Our $100M Series B

https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b

by spatulon • 12 months ago

751 503 12 months ago

toomuchtodo• 12 months ago

Big congrats to the Oxide team.

kamranjon• 12 months ago

Anyone here using oxide hardware? I remember reading their blog post when they were spinning up and it seems like they have actual products now.

flobosg• 12 months ago

They have for a while already, see https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891).

nahimn• 12 months ago

Rooting for this team -- just wish i could afford one of these racks... =)

dijit• 12 months ago

Same.

I think it brings an interesting point actually.

"Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need, but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes.

((controversial take warning))

Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86 boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of cheap x86 hardware meant that the lions share of development happened on them.

People could throw a pentium 2 PC in a corner and have it serving web traffic, and when things started growing too much you could add more P2 machines or even grab a Xeon 4socket machine later down the line.

This isn't possible with mainframes, and thus, people largely don't mess with them.

The annoying thing is that this kind of problem has some kind of stickiness effect. If you need a server, and then another, you buy them as you need them and if you're already 20 pizza boxes in; it's a pretty big ask to rip them all out and moving to a different vendor entirely than staging replacements one after another.

So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors?

I don't think I've worked for any of those.

(FD: I'm actually a fan of the Oxide team, and the concept, and I would buy into the ecosystem except I have needs that are at most 3 servers at a time)

supriyo-biswas• 12 months ago

So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors?

Companies do modernization/migration projects from time to time; I guess one way to solve the audience issue is to find companies that have such a planned event and try to market a “better” alternative.

While I’m also a fan of Oxide; my primary concern is whether they can actually get companies to ignore the marketing that comes out of cloud services.

ipdashc• 12 months ago

A great point regarding mainframes, but isn't it somewhat irrelevant given that Oxide's computer is x86 and mainly (...only?) intended as a VM host? And I assume most people are running things in VMs nowadays, so you can "just" migrate over images to the new system (I know it's not that simple, but it's also not quite as complicated as, I imagine, porting something from a bunch of bare-metal x86 boxen to a mainframe).

Also, I'm given the impression that Oxide prioritizes user experience - their website shows off a clean UI and they presumably have modern, easy-to-use APIs. Mainframes, in contrast, seem like a whole different world - if I convinced my company to move to a mainframe, who would even operate it? I know modern mainframes are closer to "normal" servers than their old reputation, but still, I'd imagine it's pretty esoteric stuff, and IBM is famous for not being the cheapest to work with.

I do find it pretty funny that their business model seems to be reinventing mainframes, but I feel like there are important distinctions too. Hopefully they do well (I'd also love to have access to this stuff, but yeah, same "needs that are at most 3 servers" deal).

actionfromafar3• 12 months ago

I guess if you have big pile of pizza boxes, buying an Oxide could feel like buying Oxide Family Pizza and going from there. Maybe you don't migrate everything at once.

tryauuum• 12 months ago

governments maybe?

cdaringe2• 12 months ago

Not very controversial, tbh. Your observation is essentially that there is momentum on a current platform, which yields availability, pricing, and general convenience benefit. It’s borderline indisputable!

The market is complex. Those who will buy will be those who find that the existing ying doesn’t snap perfectly into their own business’ yang. They’ll be at the margins first (the post references a lab for instance, not a booming tech company), then over time less so.

bpt36• 12 months ago

The target audience as I understand it is companies that have gone cloud-only or close to it and are big enough where moving workload on-prem makes financial sense.

They can migrate to an Oxide "cloud" without too much difficultly as opposed to procuring, installing, and maintaining the rube goldberg machine you mentioned.

They also attract interest among the "we don't want to touch cloud" organizations where trying out $1M in hardware is a rounding error, but I don't know how much traction they'd end up getting.

sneak3• 12 months ago

Always refreshing to see people who actually believe in software freedoms (and not just doing open source cosplay like many big corporations) forge a pathway to big success.

There are many things that suggest free software and the movement for software freedoms might be on its way to a historical footnote. This is absolutely not one of them.

Hey Bryan, one day when you’re very successful market-wise (you and your team have already obviously been massively successful from an engineering standpoint) and aren’t in crash-priority-override mode to get cash flow, please consider a project to build SME stuff that reaps the security and integration benefits of your big enterprise stuff that is affordable for end users like entrepreneurs and home hobbyists, like Ubiqiti does. I’d love a lil’ $5-10k homelab unit, and I bet a number of smaller universities and organizations would go for stuff in the low 5 figure 2-3kW range. Obviously your bread and butter comes from companies that size their orders by number of racks, but if you never go downmarket then thousands of us hackers that love what you’re doing will never get to touch Oxide stuff except at a job in a megacorp.

immibis2• 12 months ago

The term "open source" was created by corporations in opposition to "free software", as a watered-down version of the latter. Open source itself is already free software cosplay.

cestith9• 12 months ago

It would be a good onramp into their ecosystem. Compare this to the deep educational discounts and the school-targeted platforms from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and such.

kensai• 12 months ago

All the best! I personally came to know Oxide for their cool RFD culture. It's worth a read:

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

Start from RFD 1 ;)

cosmic_quanta2• 12 months ago

I love the idea. RFD 1 mentions taking inspiration from Golang and Rust proposal processes. The Haskell Foundation also uses the same proposal process, and I love it.

I'm a big proponent of the "writing is thinking" mantra. Unfortunately, in my experience, not all technical leaders value grassroots proposal processes like the Oxide RFDs

bcantrill6• 12 months ago

Just because it's hopelessly on-brand for us to offer up a podcast episode for everything, you may also be interested in our Oxide and Friends episode on RFDs with our colleagues Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.[0]

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...

ghaff5• 12 months ago

I need to dive back in. Lots of distractions recently.

KetoMojito• 12 months ago

Bryan you absolute legend. You give the best technical seminars i've ever watched (& countlessly rewatched). Ty for inspiring a generation of engineers. Best of luck with everything at Oxide!

bflesch• 12 months ago

the rfd interface looks really nice. I couldn't find the github repo for it, is it proprietary?

Edit: some popup on their page links to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd but it's a 404

Edit2: it's at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site

jppope• 12 months ago

Love what they are putting out in the world! Congrats on the round, and being able to proliferate the work!

setheron• 12 months ago

Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ? A bit humorous from that perspective given Cantrills dislike for Larry Nevertheless cool company and product.

immibis2• 12 months ago

Competing with someone you don't like who has a monopoly on something makes a lot of sense.

atonse• 12 months ago

Isn’t the main issue with Oracle the aggressive sales and exploitation of captive customers?

calvinmorrison• 12 months ago

I'd assume oracles main issue is that personal-computers-on-steroids as servers mostly won, and we don't all need AS/400 or mainframe architectures. 99% of problems can be solved with practically commodity hardware and software.

Sparkle-san• 12 months ago

They don't call oracle "a law firm with a software division" for no reason.

cpach9• 12 months ago

To me they are much more similar to Sun than Oracle (before the latter aquired the former).

throw0101c6• 12 months ago

Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ?

Oxide is kind of like Sun Microsystems, building polished vertically integrated monster machines, e.g. Sun E10k.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise

panick21_6• 12 months ago

The opposition to Oracle was never about building vertically integrated machines.

MOARDONGZPLZ• 12 months ago

Very bullish on this team! Congrats. I’ve been pushing my company to adopt their hardware, and we have!

cosmic_quanta2• 12 months ago

How do you like using their stuff? I would be interested in reading an experience report

htrp• 12 months ago

Same! also curious about how you think about the potential of vendor lock-in?

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

(Not your parent) What kind of lock in are you worried about?

oldpersonintx2• 12 months ago

great people and vision, but the hardware market went apoplectic for GPUs at scale just as they were pushing a better way to manage VMs

in the midst of everyone making a land grab for GB200s, does anyone have time to evaluate their alternative OS?

mrcwinn2• 12 months ago

Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary:

We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...]

Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

actionfromafar3• 12 months ago

That would be even more outlandish, I don't think that's possible.

lumost4• 12 months ago

It depends, there are certainly founders who come from sufficient money that the value of founding a unicorn is not material to their Net worth.

However I’d also suggest that the concentration of tech in the last decade is also partly due to startups chronically stiffing their employees on equity. The difference in compensation potential naturally forces a talent split where talent joins larger and much better compensated firms.

illegalmemory• 12 months ago

They have since updated it slightly

Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component.

ekianjo2• 12 months ago

so basically everything converges to having specific reasons to have different salary schemes.

IncreasePosts• 12 months ago

Why is sales special? Why not just have some performance bar for that, just like all the other positions?

dustingetz• 12 months ago

indeed, founders are generally compensated at half the competitive rate

NewUser76312• 12 months ago

Of course not, what's the purpose of asking such as silly question?

Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve?

diggan10• 12 months ago

Of course not, what's the purpose of asking such as silly question?

How is it silly if they already do that for salaries? Co-ops with equal ownership isn't unheard of, and isn't silly at all.

sneak3• 12 months ago

That isn’t a snarky position; early employees in high output orgs like this generally work just as much as founders do.

The founders aren’t really taking on that much more risk than the rest of the early team; it’s the VC’s money, not theirs.

I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that employees deserve the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare and valuable and should be rewarded immensely), but it is not an insane proposition.

It’s especially popular among people who think the actual work output is more important than the leadership initiative. Both are obviously essential, and founders do both, while employees do only the first (or they’d be founders themselves).

shortrounddev24• 12 months ago

Salary and equity have nothing to do with what you "deserve", only what you're able to negotiate.

TrackerFF• 12 months ago

A company can't function without employees, so why not?

Aurornis17• 12 months ago

Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve

The founders are excluded from the employee compensation discussion. They own the company because they founded it. Nobody thinks they just put the equity into a structure that nobody owns.

The question is whether all employees are compensated equally, which is a very important detail. Giving everyone the same salary is very different than giving everyone the same total compensation.

lostmsu2• 12 months ago

A lot of people with broken /s detector are replying to this comment.

Aurornis17• 12 months ago

Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot.

Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base salary but then were silent on the equity comp strategy. Everyone knows that in a job like this the total comp is important.

The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting. There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I heard this from a now ex-employee of Oxide who was describing how to navigate their hiring process, so take with a grain of salt.

EDIT: I checked their website again. The compensation link goes to a blog post ( https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ) which has this section about equity:

Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. While it’s true that startup equity is important, it’s also true that startup equity doesn’t pay the orthodontist’s bill or get the basement repainted. We believe that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in the company’s future (and that an outsized return for investors should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also believe that the presence of equity can’t be used as an excuse for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.

Which doesn't answer the question.

ethbr12• 12 months ago

Anyone who doesn’t ask about compensation (at least at a later point in the interview process) would be a red flag to me.

Most valuable people know they’re valuable, and do (and should!) negotiate compensation.

mystraline4• 12 months ago

There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically.

I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing.

Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment.

If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them.

But somehow, I'm supposed to not care about money at the same time caring about money.

conjectures• 12 months ago

There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal

It's not an unusual way of thinking, but every time I see it, it seems bizarre to me. If the candidate was to propose any project once hired, I'm sure these folks would want them to think about costs and benefits.

This policy selects either for people unable to reflect on their life with the same wit they apply to work; or people who will front about their motivations. Both seem like poor outcomes.

tshaddox3• 12 months ago

There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically.

I think companies avoiding discussions about compensation is a negative signal, because they’re only in it for my labor.

999900000999• 12 months ago

At this point I've accepted most equity comp in a non public company is worth less than toilet paper.

When it comes time to actually cash out or you notice some animals are more equal than others, the excuses start. The drama happens. No one knows what the equity is worth. If you try and advocate for yourself you'll be told the equity is actually worthless.

From here the 200k salary seems fair. Just don't live in SF. Chicago , Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, quite a few cities are perfectly livable on 200k.

In fact, in any of the above metros you will be living nice.

oooyay• 12 months ago

The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting. There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically.

I can't say anything of Oxide because I don't really know the people involved other than reading their writing.

This is an attitude a lot of industry veterans have. Most of them were in software pre-2015 and have long made their money and paid their debts. They saw the haydays of job hopping, massive salaries, massive equity, and "rockstars" (that never were). The people I know that joined software post-2015 and onward are not in the same financial position.

singron• 12 months ago

"total comp" (salary+equity) is really hard to quantify for a private company. In order to qualify as ISOs, the stock options need to be priced at the Fair Market Value (FMV), which makes them essentially worth ~$0 on paper on the day they are granted. In order to value them differently, you need to guess if/how the company will increase in value in the future. If the gains were guaranteed, then that should be factored into the current FMV, so options always have significant uncertainty.

This is unlike an RSU from a public company, where you can sell the value of your shares as they vest and add that to your income with minor risk of price volatility.

timerol• 12 months ago

Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.

I think that paragraph answers the question pretty clearly. As an Oxide employee you will get equity. It will generally be less than the people that came before you, but more than people that come after you. So it's obviously not the same as everyone else

mrcwinn2• 12 months ago

Exactly right. It doesn’t answer the question. It does some cartwheels to avoid to the reality: despite their philosophies and soap boxing on compensation, equity is a form of compensation and their equity is no doubt distributed very, very differently.

It’s intellectually dishonest. I look forward though to their “in depth” follow up post.

Etheryte• 12 months ago

Out of curiosity, how would you imagine that working out, technically and specifically? You start out with founders having equity, and maybe some early investors. Then you employ some people and... what happens exactly? Are new shares created, is everyone who was already onboard slowly diluted, what happens when someone joins and leaves? Etc, I don't think there is an approach to this where all sides would be happy, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

Not your parent, and not suggesting in any way that Oxide is one, but the key term you want to search to learn more about that kind of arrangement is "worker owned cooperatives." There's a lot of variety in how it's handled.

kortilla4• 12 months ago

This has been the biggest red flag to me about oxide since these blogs came out. You don’t join a startup for salary and every startup I’ve been at that emphasizes fair salaries is doing that to intentionally discourage people from pushing on total compensation.

Employees apart from the very early ones are likely really getting fucked on equity because oxide explicitly treats candidates asking about equity as a red flag.

Companies structured like this end up turning into a combination of rich people who don’t need money and are just interested in the problem space and then mediocre people who can’t get a better offer. (If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely available.)

Unless Oxide is giving out huge equity bonuses for good perf (which would make their comp post hypocritical), it’s going to have a continuous talent decline as it grows. There aren’t enough independently wealthy high performers interested in what Oxide is doing to sustain a talent pool.

mwcampbell• 12 months ago

(If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely available.)

But how good do you have to be at things other than the work itself (edit: and how lucky as well) to land one of those jobs with higher compensation? For someone outside of high-cost-of-living tech hubs, Oxide's fixed salary could be life-changing all by itself, even with minimal equity. The fact that they take that deal doesn't necessarily mean that they're mediocre.

pjmlp• 12 months ago

Congratulations on the achievement.

It is always a pleasure to follow up with Oxide on their podcast, their technological decision to keep the Solaris linage alive, all the places across the infrastructure they have been using Go and Rust as well.

ryao2• 12 months ago

Congratulations everyone at Oxide!

siliconc0w• 12 months ago

Pretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their own compute knows the pain they're solving.

Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they realize how thick the margins have become or want better guarantees over sovereignty.

master_crab• 12 months ago

I don’t disagree that there are some fat margins in the cloud, but how is vendor lock-in any different here? Companies could end up paying fat margins to oxide too while still managing physical gear and plant.

TZubiri2• 12 months ago

Well, their servers are mostly hypervisors, so the interface is mostly any virtual machine.

You can "just" migrate by exporting or importing the vms.

turnsout2• 12 months ago

I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write:

  > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to run cloud…

To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?

I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on a server and never think about infrastructure.

throw0101c6• 12 months ago

To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?

Machine/system/service deployment via API.

See §Essential Characteristics

On-demand self-service; Broad network access; Resource pooling; Rapid elasticity; Measured service

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

None are generally applicable to standalone pizza boxes as managed individual (as opposed to being herded by (e.g.) OpenStack).

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

To "run cloud?"

I agree that's a bit awkwardly phrased, let me send in a patch for that.

Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?

Not exactly any of that. We let you treat an entire rack as a single pool of resources, spinning up virtual machines that our control plane manages for you. Think "VPS provider but you own it." There's an API, but if you want to see what our console looks like, you can poke around with a demo here: https://console-preview.oxide.computer/

skybrian• 12 months ago

No GPU’s yet, so it’s not good for LLM’s. But they have a lot of funding now, so perhaps that will change?

jillesvangurp• 12 months ago

I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month.

There are of course benefits to using cloud based VMs and I use them as well. But you are paying a very steep premium for what is a pitiful amount of compute and memory. There's a lot of wiggle room for price decreases and the only thing preventing that is a lack of competition. There's a reason Amazon is so rich: nobody seems to challenge them on AWS pricing. There's value in having them do all the faffing about with hardware of course. That's why companies use them. I'm in GCP; but same principle. I don't want to have to worry about replacing hard disks in the middle of the night, deal with network routers that are misbehaving, cooling issues, etc. That's why I pay them the big bucks. But I'm well aware that it's not that great of a deal.

I used Hetzner a decade ago and paid something like 50 euros per month for a quad core xeon with a raid 1 disks, 32 GB, etc. Bare metal of course. But also, 50 euro. We had five of those. Forget about getting anything close to that with modern cloud providers for anything resembling a reasonable price. Your first monthly bill might actually add up to enough to buy your own hardware. Very tempting. They have beefed up their specs since then. You now get more for less. And they also do VMs now.

throwup238• 12 months ago

I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad the pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances were $25/hr. That’s over $200k/yr for the reserved instances so within two years I’d spend enough to buy my own 8x H100 pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) plus enough to pay an engineer to babysit five pods at a time. It’s insane.

With on-demand pricing the pod would pay for itself (and the cost to manage it) within a year.

time0ut• 12 months ago

In my experience, companies seem to want to pay the cloud provider tax in order to avoid capacity planning. Sometimes it makes sense because it is hard to predict when something is going to take off. I have also worked at companies with very predictable growth paying insane amounts. I didn’t understand the logic, but they still were profitable and paid well so whatever.

geodel2• 12 months ago

Agree. But those fat margins can get starting to be shared with CIOs, CTOs and other managers with purchasing power. IMO the constant hectoring at workplace about migration to cloud or cloud native crap is not coming from some deep technical principles. It is more of Do it before you get fired for non-compliance

AndrewKemendo2• 12 months ago

Having done web applications for oh…30 years now the key pain is network routing

That’s the only thing I can tell is useful about “the cloud”

I can build racks and servers easily, but the challenge is availability and getting past everyone’s firewalls

So the real win is any service that allows for instant DNS table updates and availability of DNS whitelisting.

This is why Google, Msft etc win in email because they have trusted endpoints

Alternative routes with self signed DKIM etc is more or less blocked by default forcing you onto a provider

We need more cloud flare tunnel and local hosting via commercial ISP routes and less new centralized data centers

chrisweekly• 12 months ago

+1 Insightful.

I've also been doing web-related work for a living for over 25y and yours is the most spot-on take I've seen in this discussion.

bambax• 12 months ago

At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far.

But at the high end, I think the market is litterally infinite. Every large company should want this, and want it now. Cloud providers are extremely expensive and, outside of the 1-tier where prices are really outrageous, they perform poorly and often offer little support.

This really feels like the future.

naikrovek3• 12 months ago

like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's computer! and they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!"

Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are far better than submitting a request to some queue and having your VM provisioned manually 1 week later by someone who gets a key detail wrong. APIs and granular permissions are how this should be done, and "the cloud" taught everyone that very early. But a lot of companies are really stuck in the cloud mindset now, and won't let go of it.

I think companies like Oxide and product lines like theirs are going to start becoming common. Microsoft, of course, completely fumbled the ball with Azure Stack, and I've never even heard of anyone deploying AWS Outpost, both for the same reason: the costs for these are absolutely insane for what they provide.

What most folks really want is their own infrastructure running their own stuff using APIs that are either written in-house or provided by some vendor. Oxide is betting that they can sell you a working scalable system for less money than it would take to hire a team to write the APIs that would allow a company to do the same with off-the-shelf hardware. I think that they're probably right about that.

boricj• 12 months ago

At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far.

Anyone can throw together a bunch of parts and software to run Internet-facing services from a closet. That doesn't mean that you're safe from issues that Oxide aims to solve, especially at that small scale.

My homelab (which hosts my blog and a couple of other things) runs off a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard ordered on AliExpress, featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. Yes, that's a mobile CPU shoehorned onto a desktop platform with a funky mounting bracket to take AM4/AM5 coolers.

Anyways, I wanted to run SmartOS on it, but this system is so janky that the Illumos kernel couldn't find any PCIe devices at all. After spending an afternoon reconfiguring PCIe bridges by hand with the kernel debugger in an attempt to troubleshoot PCIe initialization, I gave up and installed Proxmox.

Admittedly, as far as janky hardware this takes the cake, but the point stands. To paraphrase Bryan, buggy firmware is the sysadmin's worst enemy.

Rafuino• 12 months ago

Great news for Oxide. I followed their podcasts for a while but they petered out and I haven't heard much about their products/growth for a while. Sounds like it's still viable.

USIT... what a cryptic website! Is it government-related (like In-Q-Tel) or private? Have no idea...

neilv• 12 months ago

https://oodaloop.com/analysis/archive/thomas-tull-chairs-the...

colesantiago• 12 months ago

Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here?

$100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M?

Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?

cpach9• 12 months ago

AFAIK staying private is nearly impossible after taking VC funding…?

Also, what they do is very capital-intensive, so I’m not surprised that they’re raising more money.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 12 months ago

I don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very good team though.

cpach9• 12 months ago

These days there are very few companies innovating in this space. Oxide is the only one I can think of. (No, HPE and Dell doesn’t count, not in my book at least.)

There used to be lots of them, but they all had a very rough time after the 90s when cheap x86 boxes started to become ubiquitous.

I have no idea if Oxide will succeed or not, but I sure hope so. If it goes well they might become the Sun of the 20s.

dvtkrlbs• 12 months ago

They created a lot of hardware and low level work. (The bullet point on the blog post)

mkeeter2• 12 months ago

The server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs from the usual vendors.

The "secret sauce management layer" is available at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the MPLv2 license.

(I work at Oxide)

cestith9• 12 months ago

Do hardware integrators usually build their own BMC, their own power supply, their own backplane, their own firmware, their own motherboards, their own switches, their own SDN, their own hypervisor, their own OS, their own rack design, their own blade / sled design, their own management API, and build it all in coordination with each other to produce a comprehensively new computing platform?

In my mind they’re much more like an SGI, Sun, IBM, DEC, or Apple type of play than merely an integrator.

bananapub• 12 months ago

what a weird take.

they produce a private cloud in the form of racks you can buy then just plug in to power and ethernet and run. also, they did a bunch of work so the OOB management isn't fucking terrible, and it uses way less power per FLOP because they bothered to, for example, "make the fans work properly".

Dell will sell you a thousand servers you can then buy racks for, then rack yourself, then buy switches from Aruba, then plug all the switches in to all the computers, then pay VMWare for an vm-cluster-OS, then you can install that, then when something goes wrong you get to call up Dell, Aruba and VMWare and have them all tell you it's someone else's fault.

you...don't get the difference between these two situations?

simonw2• 12 months ago

From the article:

"Our thesis is [...] and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off."

So the goal is an IPO.

heeton• 12 months ago

I'd assume eventual IPO. And/or specific lucrative contracts within US Govt/Military/Tech.

kayson2• 12 months ago

What do they need so much capital for?

dcminter2• 12 months ago

I think the downvoting on you is a little harsh. TFA does allude to it, but doesn't explicitly answer your question. I presume the implicit answer is here:

With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together?

i.e. they need the capital in order to be able to satisfy large orders on sane timeframes - but that's very expensive when you're a hardware business.

kayson2• 12 months ago

Thanks. It was a genuine question but I guess I can see how it might be taken otherwise.

simonw2• 12 months ago

My guess is scaling up their ability to manufacture hardware.

devmor2• 12 months ago

They are a hardware company. Hardware costs a lot of money to innovate and build on.

tosh• 12 months ago

Kudos & godspeed!

(random superficial comment: the ascii art + high fidelity ui combination on the oxide landing page is chef's kiss)

raphman• 12 months ago

Gergely Orosz' newsletter contained some background on Oxide in 2024:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/oxide

dcminter2• 12 months ago

Oxide, at least for an outsider, looks like a company that channels some of the spirit of early Sun Microsystems (I'm aware of the connections of course). I'm quite envious of those who work there - I hope the demands of big money don't crush any of that spirit.

Sadly when I look at their jobs posted I don't see much that would line up with my skillset, but I keep an eye on them just on the offchance.

Quarrel2• 12 months ago

Right?

And such a clear value statement.

If I could, I'd invest. Sure, they might fail, but they're shooting their shot, and to me it has a clear differentiator that would improve the market for most of their users (if not the incumbents).

criddell• 12 months ago

I wish there was a way for small investors ($25-50k) to get in. AFAIK, the only thing we can do is wait for an IPO and hope we can get in at a reasonable price.

EcommerceFlow• 12 months ago

Isn't it sad we're not able to invest into most new tech companies these days, with private equity taking the lead. I don't blame the companies after seeing what going public entails, but still unfortunate.

maerF0x02• 12 months ago

some aspect of that picture are nanny-state sorts of laws like Accreditation which have a bias that says if you're "poor" then you're not intelligent enough or qualified enough to make your own best choices of investment.

I was happy to learn about Sweater Ventures https://www.sweaterventures.com/our-story (and their kind) which are opening up access to investments, and also helping ensure the entry price is quite low (for example I invest $50 a month with them) .

It is my hope that in the future you will be able to order a micro fraction of any company as easily as you could a starbucks.

And IMO part of that equation might be to have the state start to work against contracts which restrict your rights on your own property (essentially contracts restrict when you can sell your shares, usually not until IPO or a company organized liquidity event)

Aurornis17• 12 months ago

There are actually a lot of ways to invest in smaller startups now, but the catch is that the best startups don’t want your money.

Even if all of the laws lined up just right, it’s unlikely that a company like Oxide would be interested in collecting a lot of little investors and then maintaining all of the obligations that go along with serving those investors.

digitaltrees• 12 months ago

Yes. This is a real problem. It started as a result of the Enron collapse. The government over corrected in an effort to keep the public safe from fraud. On the flip side many people with pensions are invested in private markets through their pension funds.

drdrek• 12 months ago

God why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT...

Cool 1999 aesthetics though

devmor2• 12 months ago

If you scroll past the marketing blurb, I think the rest of the main page explains in pretty clear and simple terms what their product is. What did you find confusing about it?

mlnj• 12 months ago

Reading the first 20 lines of text that they have broken down in to:

Company Name Single line Headline

Problem Our Solution

Gives you the entire company premise and product description.

qualeed• 12 months ago

They explain what they do pretty much immediately on the home page, I'm not too sure where the confusion comes from.

diggan10• 12 months ago

Maybe I'm old-school, but I clicked on the logo in the top left, then read the first sentence which reads "On-demand elastic resources", which gives me some idea about what it is, and then later it says "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data center." which makes me 100% understand what the product is.

Do new internet users not know that the landing page usually contains information about the product they're talking about in their blog posts? 99% of the cases you can find what you're looking for on the landing page, and it took me a whole of 30 seconds to get here, writing this comment took longer time.

sofixa5• 12 months ago

On-demand elastic resources

Which is kind of wrong, because there is nothing elastic nor "on demand" about metal you buy.

actionfromafar3• 12 months ago

Frontpage: "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data center."

Seems pretty clear to me.

voganmother42• 12 months ago

The usage/meaning of “private cloud” has gotten weird

subarctic• 12 months ago

They make giant rack scale computers for data centers, i think that's the best way to explain it quickly to someone with my background who's never been in a data center but has an imaginary idea of what they look like.

And then as a follow up you have to explain that

- they sell an entire rack full of servers

- they're the only ones that do this. Normally you have to buy all the pieces and put it together yourself, or pay someone to put it together for you but all the parts are kind of designed on their own by different companies so it's kind of a mess. Oxide makes one big rack with like 16-32 servers and it's all designed by them and just works, so you just plug it in and you have servers you can put a bunch of vms on. Oh and they're huge, each one literally costs like a million dollars

throw0101c6• 12 months ago

Meta: Oxide has talked about the designs of their cooling [1][2][3], so I'm curious to know if they ever start offering GPUs how they'd handle that.

Folks seem to be moving toward liquid cooling[4] either to the rack/chassis[5] or even to the chip[6].

[1] https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVXClXVuzE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hTJYY_Y1H9Q

[4] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic...

[5] https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/top-10-liquid-co...

[6] https://zutacore.com

jvanderbot2• 12 months ago

Oxide's blogs talk about cooling _a lot_, apparently their stack runs very cool b/c they've reorganized the whole thing around efficiency, and written all the firmware to support that goal.

vonneumannstan• 12 months ago

Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that

Aurornis17• 12 months ago

Oxide is doing some great things, but there’s only so much you can do with firmware tweaks. A CPU running any load at all is going to completely eclipse the power usage of everything else in the system.

Incremental improvements from things like more efficient fans and reducing the number of power conversions is great, but the power drawn by the CPUs or GPUs is on another level.

Rendello• 12 months ago

If after that you're not satiated with data center cooling talk, Jane Street's Signals and Threads just did an episode about their cooling infrastructure a few days ago:

https://signalsandthreads.com/the-thermodynamics-of-trading/

jvanderbot2• 12 months ago

There is something so calming and pleasant about a well-structured thesis statement:

Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!) strategically important for many; that the entire stack — hardware and software — needed to be rethought from first principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off.

Very clear and logical, stating from their first principle world view what the result could be if they succeed.

chubot2• 12 months ago

I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"?

I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project

https://github.com/opencomputeproject

Google definitely rebuilt the stack from first principles -- the data center was basically a huge embedded system, from power to racks to CPUs/memory/disk/network to kernel to user space to cluster software. (And no, they did not use Kubernetes.)

I have no idea how active the OpenCompute project is -- is Facebook still the main contributor, and are they still releasing their new rack designs?

And I also wonder how much Oxide has diverged from it? At least on the hardware side. On the software side, I guess the Illumos-derived parts and Rust parts are completely different.

Well, when they say they did their own:

    - board designs
    - microcontroller OS
    - platform enablement software
    - host hypervisor
    - switch 
    - integrated storage service
    - control plane

Then yeah it seems like maybe only board designs and the switch COULD have either come from or been influenced by OpenCompute, but maybe those didn't either. (I have no idea tbh)

Maybe they only got the mechanical and power stuff from OpenCompute? i.e. the parts that change more slowly

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

We initially talked about OpenCompute, yeah, but as far as I know we ended up moving away from that years ago.

bcantrill6• 12 months ago

We didn't use anything from OCP. When we first started the company, we thought we might use the enclosure (and considered ourselves "OCP inspired"), but there ended up being little value in doing so (and there was a clear cost). And on the stuff that we really cared about (e.g., getting rid of the traditional BMC), we were completely at odds with OCP (where ASPEED BMCs abound!).

So in the end, even the mechanical and power didn't come from OCP. We clearly build on other components (we didn't build own rectifiers!), but we absolutely built the machine from first principles.

krelian• 12 months ago

public company

Why does it have to be a public company though?

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

It is either that or acquisition, and we would prefer an IPO.

bcantrill6• 12 months ago

Because VCs need to have a way to sell their shares within the (limited) lifetime of their fund.

neom• 12 months ago

I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I could tell the answers were "yes" and "don't care" - I had thought this wasn't a great answer but it seems I'm wrong. I was chatting with Boris Mann just last week about them and he said "actually John that isn't correct, think of how much quick compute needs to come online and how much discreet compute is going to be required with low management overhead, they're doing just fine and that market will grow" - After that I did some research and pondered on it for a day - I think my friend is right and I am wrong, I think at this point Oxide is going to be a really strong name and I wish them the best of luck.

sethops1• 12 months ago

I was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?

9dev• 12 months ago

If it translates to improved efficiency, sure. And this big of a round seems to indicate that idea has some merit

transpute3• 12 months ago

What percentage of enterprise IT compute has not moved to a public cloud?

zer00eyz• 12 months ago

Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?

Look at who oxide is selling to and for what reasons.

It's about compute + software at rack scales. It does not matter if it is good it matters that it's integrated. Gear at this level is getting sold with a service contract and "good" means you dont have to field as many calls (keeping the margins up).

Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough?

Look at their CPU density and do the math on power. It's fairly low density. Look at the interconnects (100gb per system). Also fairly conservative. It's the perfect product to replace hardware that is aging out, as you wont have to re-plumb for more power/bandwidth, and you still get a massive upgrade.

esseph3• 12 months ago

I imagine most of the customers are highly technical, not typical generic business class.

throwpup666• 12 months ago

I still dont get it. If someone else's software is running the hardware, what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite?

transpute3• 12 months ago

Is the software open-source with reproducible builds of any runtime binaries?

Oxide has been remarkably transparent about the development and architecture of critical system components. We can only hope they succeed and inspire others to follow their transparency lead.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

If someone else's software is running the hardware

Our stack is open source.

what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite?

The difference is not where it runs, it's that you own our racks, rather than rent them. In the traditional cloud, you're renting. Other vendors who sell you hardware will still have you paying software licensing fees, so it never feels like you truly own it. We don't have any licensing fees.

bpt36• 12 months ago

Cloud computing is significantly more expensive than self-hosting for most large organizations. People are slowly figuring that out, and Oxide was a bet on the timing of that realization.

vatican_banker• 12 months ago

Banks care _a lot_ where the data is store, hence most banks are inclined to keep customer data on-prem.

Because data must be on-prem, banks are stuck in legacy infra paradigms. The whole org suffers, innovation is stiffled, yada yada…

An on-prem cloud product (hardware+software) is a game changer for these companies, IMO.

My question to oxide: how easy is to integrate external hardware into the cloud? For example: bunch of GPUs or a bunch of next-gen hardware like SambaNova.

0xbadcafebee• 12 months ago

Even if it makes no sense as a technical thing, businesses will buy it. Look at all the huge companies that keep spending millions trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time. Enterprise loves to buy big iron and self-hosting crap, so I'm sure they will be successful selling this. However, I think they're going to need to branch out to more services in order to continue increasing their revenue every year (after 5+ years lets say).

mike_d• 12 months ago

Look at all the huge companies that keep spending millions trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time

You mean all the huge companies that ran multiple datacenters before the cloud was even a thing?

unicornhose4• 12 months ago

I must admit that I am much more unsophisticated than this, and yet I "invested" in Oxide (by running my own projects off Oxide servers), and it is gratifying to see them continue to grow. My (naive) assessment: (a) agreed with Cantrill's opinions on software, (b) liked his willingness to put himself out there, and (c) felt the eng blogs showed a high level of (socio-)technical ability.

I think for the internet to break out of walled gardens, high-quality independent datacenters need to exist -- nobody wants to manage their own datacenters, and nobody wants to rely on Google/Amazon/Microsoft's platforms or (even worse) business products. I hope this continues.

cpach9• 12 months ago

Did you order a unit from them or how did you manage to get access to the Oxide hardware?

zem• 12 months ago

I'm a fan just because they have such an incredibly good sounding product. like, it has no relevance to me, I'll never use it, but I get a deep sense of satisfaction just reading about how it works.

skeptrune• 12 months ago

Huge congrats to everyone at oxide! I could not be happier to see such a cool company trying to create a real alternative to renting from the hyperscalers.

bix62• 12 months ago

What is the initial cost to setup their smallest system on prem?

diggan10• 12 months ago

Not finding a ton of information about it, was curious about it too. But the "smallest system" seems huge, like 16 sleds and a HN comment from 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840) says:

An oxide rack has a minimum cost of something like 600k not including all the infra you need to run a rack, maintenance, and then needing to upgrade

So maybe not super useful for people who are looking to do some home-lab stuff or even setups for SMBs.

Edit: Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552556

My guess is that a base config would be somewhere between $400K to $500K but could very definitely go up from there for a completely "loaded" config.

bix62• 12 months ago

Wow so really for F500 and such

axus• 12 months ago

Meanwhile in VMWare-land, you might pay that much in subscription fees with no hardware. https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/1h8brs2/i_literally...

vhodges• 12 months ago

If you have to ask.... :)

(other people's) previous guesstimates were 500k - 1M. It does look like you can order it partially provisioned (compute wise I'm guessing) and expand later.

mijoharas• 12 months ago

I googled this out of curiousity a little while ago, it seemed to be 600k or so. (possibly dubious source so ymmv) [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840

sudomateo5• 12 months ago

We're working on publishing an updating pricing page to better communicate this to the public. Stay tuned!

Here's what I can knowingly share. We sell full-rack and half-rack SKUs today coming in at 1024/16TiB and 2048/32TiB of CPU cores and RAM respectively. Disk varies depending on the drive size. On top of the cost of the rack you'll pay an annual percentage for support and that's it. No software licensing or other weird fees.

lostmsu2• 12 months ago

Amazing, considering they don't seem to have GPU offerings.

cpach9• 12 months ago

There are very many workloads that do not benefit from a GPU.

esafak• 12 months ago

I see no mention of GPUs in their platform?

cpach9• 12 months ago

Earlier answer from Oxide employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182660

yencabulator11• 12 months ago

My personal predictions:

#1: Don't expect to see it until after AMD or someone else makes a product that actually manages to compete against Nvidia. Nvidia is pretty hostile to not running their low-level software stack, and Oxide is all about the legacy of Solaris.

#2: AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package.

#3: AMD MI400 and such AI accelerators will be primarily sold as full racks with its own custom "networking" (UALink switch), and the actual host CPU on those devices will be lower specs and mostly relegated to setup and metrics of the AI work, much like storage and networking appliances are built, AI workload will not even pass through the host CPU. I'm not sure Oxide can compete in that world. The "business logic CPUs" will reside in a different rack.

zozbot2345• 12 months ago

AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package.

Isn't this just an iGPU? They generally have much lower performance than GPU's sitting on a dedicated card.

mystraline4• 12 months ago

I applied here. Basically anti-llm long form one-sided interview writeup.

Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was sent. No reasons, either.

I probably should have just used an LLM to generate good sounding garbage. Probably the same chance to get even a stage 1 interview.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

We do take a long time due to needing to read all of those applications, but three months is longer than we'd like, so I apologize about that.

We don't do "stage 1 interviews", we only do interviews as the very final step in the process, when we've narrowed things down to a handful of people. That initial packet is like 85% of the process.

kierangill• 12 months ago

I applied in early 2021. Getting rejected from any company carries a sting, but I was grateful to have gone through the process.

I didn’t realize at the time, but Oxide’s application process was the best form of interview prep I’ve done. The process forced me to thoroughly document my values and career accomplishments. In later non-Oxide interviews, I effectively recited what I had written my materials. In that way, it has felt less one-sided than every other company application process I’ve gone through. I was able to take away an artifact from the experience, versus being filtered out via a coding challenge. It’s also been rewarding to reflect on my submission from years ago to see how my mindset and skills have evolved.

If you have any interest in working in the pediatric telemedicine space, I encourage you to email me your application. We accept Oxide materials. I’m happy to provide feedback as a hiring manager. My email and our company website are in my bio.

sudomateo5• 12 months ago

Loved reading your experience here. Thank you for posting it. I've written about the value of an artifact in the past when people pushed back against the Oxide materials saying they are a lot of work for no guarantee. When I first applied to Oxide I was also rejected and the materials process taught me a ton about myself and changed the way I viewed job searching and my work. I shifted course and increased my skills and next time I applied I got an offer. There's power in the critical thinking and writing the materials force out of us.

MerrimanInd• 12 months ago

That's very interesting because in their episode on hiring practices they said that they hoped the materials would be a valuable exercise for anyone deeply engaged in a job search. Hearing that same feedback from the other side of the process really closes that feedback loop!

jperkin• 12 months ago

Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was sent. No reasons, either.

Yeh this is really really tough. They have an excellent RFD that explains the hiring process and it contains a section on this here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003#_rejection_of_non...

I ported their Hubris kernel to RISC-V and ARMv6 before applying for a role to work on it, so thought I had reasonably strong materials, but got rejected.

I fully understand and empathise with their reasons for not providing feedback, but it does mean you're left not knowing whether you were a hair's breadth away from getting in but were behind a better candidate and it would be worth trying again in the future, or rejected for other reasons that no improvement in materials will make up for. As a fully signed-up member of imposter syndrome club I'll obviously lean towards the latter ;)

guywithahat4• 12 months ago

The company leadership of oxide concerns me. My biggest mistakes in my (not successful) startup were when I got distracted and chased politics or some corporate goal instead of solving my customers real problems. Giving all employees the same pay or advertising social media links to small, political sites makes me worried they've taken the 100 million and are about to crowd the market with a product that's not focused on solving customer problems

cdaringe2• 12 months ago

What observations have you made that they are not or would not be focused on solving customer problems?

guywithahat4• 12 months ago

That they're instead focused on standardizing employee salary, or promoting their company through niche political websites.

These are decisions that the CEO is making, which means they're distracted. This is fine when you've received nearly 200 million in total funding, but won't work once you're expected to add the same level of value while being profitable.

sunshowers9• 12 months ago

A consequence of us all making the same amount of money is that we don't waste time on performance reviews!

jhickok• 12 months ago

Huh, what I read and hear leads me to believe that they will succeed because of their leadership.

cestith9• 12 months ago

Does it follow that because you lost focus that someone else will?

guywithahat4• 12 months ago

In theory yes, but in practice only so many companies receive nearly 200 million in funding, and they'll be able to buy out competitors and consolidate the market for years to come. Oxide will likely be with us for a while, and in 5-10 years I wouldn't be surprised if people start to hate them while their exec team hangs out with Tom Brady

whalesalad• 12 months ago

I would really love to run their control plane in my homelab.

mkeeter2• 12 months ago

I'm not aware of folks outside the company running the whole control plane, but people have definitely gotten parts of the system running at home:

https://artemis.sh/2022/03/14/propolis-oxide-at-home-pt1.htm...

(The author of this blog post now works for Oxide!)

jefurii• 12 months ago

How much of the software stack is even possible to run without the specialized hardware? I'd also really like to try that control plane..

yankcrime• 12 months ago

Congrats to the Oxide folks, like a lot of others I'm rooting for you.

lawik• 12 months ago

I love following their adventures. Glad to see that it continues.

piker• 12 months ago

Aside from the actual product, On the Metal / Oxide and Friends are really great podcasts that manage to make programming topics entertaining and educational. Bryan Cantrill is wildly entertaining and knowledgeable at the same time. His co-hosts and guests are great, too, and I attribute a lot of that to feeding off of his energy and storytelling. Highly recommend, especially for Rust folks.

louwrentius• 12 months ago

They got $100M from USIT, which seems to be owned by Thomas Tull

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tull

azemetre• 12 months ago

Always happy to see Oxide Computer succeeding. As others have mention their podcast is truly great and their productive is quite innovative in the space.

With this news I hope they plan on expanding hiring for frontend devs soon, would love to work with such leadership once in my life.

stego-tech• 12 months ago

Congrats to Oxide on this milestone! I’ve been following their progress since discovering them in COVID, and would love to see them shake up what’s presently a stagnant marketplace with their product line. The idea of deploying a rack of kit on-prem that’s tightly integrated instead of wrangling multiple vendors of discrete components has a strong appeal, and while the proprietary hardware stuff did initially give me pause, their commitment to building atop Open Source quelled any lingering doubts I had.

Would love to see their growth result in more versatile options, like quarter-rack or industrial deployments someday. In the meantime, congrats on the successful fundraising!

brianzelip• 12 months ago

Love the blog post with a one-off art direction!

Also love the Oxide and Friends podcast! What strikes me most lately about Oxide since falling into their hefty episode backlog, is their book club culture. I really appreciate the ability to get a fly on the wall experience of it, I learn a lot!

https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

renewiltord4• 12 months ago

They're a cool team and I like the idea so I hope it works. In our case, for the few million, we could get a hell of a lot more hardware (Epyc 9654 based machines to start with - much better operating cost / compute) so the magic must be in the software.

9cb14c1ec02• 12 months ago

There is so much more than just slapping servers in racks when you reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in server hardware. Good control plane software makes a night and day difference.

renewiltord4• 12 months ago

Admittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of thousands of cores. We almost certainly left a lot of stuff on the table, though.

Also, is your username something interesting? It feels familiar but a quick `echo -n '' | md5sum` didn't yield anything.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

It is true that because we're a young company, we currently have the initial SKU that we started selling two years ago. Like every hardware company, we'll be releasing new products with new hardware every so often. Totally hear you if the current product doesn't fit your needs though, that's just going to be the case when we're so young, but as we grow and scale, we'll be able to release more variations that could make sense for more people.

renewiltord4• 12 months ago

Good luck! Eager to see your later SKUs.

ang_cire2• 12 months ago

Good for them! I used to walk my dog past their (office? warehouse?) in Emeryville, and when the weather was warm they'd have the doors open and the giant server stacks just sitting there, looking awesome. I guess it's not really a concern that someone will steal something that looks like it'd take a forklift to move.

The ultimate aspirational homelab setup, ngl.

manquer• 12 months ago

Vandalism / sabotage would still be a concern even if theft isn’t ?

ang_cire2• 12 months ago

Honestly, not particularly. That area is really chill. It's literally across the street from Pixar's headquarters, and a block or so down from city hall. Utility outages are probably the biggest 'issue' in that neighborhood; we had power outages not infrequently, and this week they had their water main burst and shut down half the businesses nearby.

7e• 12 months ago

Investors are likely betting there is an AI play buried deeply in here somewhere.

The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything successful on their own. I predict this company will be another zombie.

checker659• 12 months ago

I predict not. There.

panick21_6• 12 months ago

never done anything successful on their own

I would love to know what you consider success then ...

revskill• 12 months ago

I don't understand what this is after reading the homepage.

cestith9• 12 months ago

A few years ago The Register described it as a rack-sized blade chassis with hardware, firmware, and software designed in-house together.

It’s a 7-foot tall rack with compute sleds, storage sleds, and network sleds. It has its own BMC design, its own power design, its own physical connectivity design, its own virtual networking design, its own hypervisor (although it’s based on Bhyve), its own OS (although it’s based on Illumos), and its own API to spin things up and configure them.

As I think of it, it’s basically a private cloud in a box and The Register wasn’t far off.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

You buy a rack of servers from us. You wheel it into a data center, plug in power and internet, turn it on. You now have a cloud in a box that you can spin up virtual machines in.

That's the high level, happy to elaborate if you have more questions.

fsckboy• 12 months ago

Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing

just want to give a shout out to my old boss from the mid 80's who had researched it (mgt consultant) and told me at that time that cloud computing was the future of all computing because the economics were inescapable.

RIP.

breatheoften• 12 months ago

I predict that if they take this same philosophy and use this money to add some new pieces on top where those new pieces are 'open' in the same way as their current hardware stack but which allows them to also run 'gpu bound' workloads well -- then I suspect they will make a ton of money.

anomaloustho• 12 months ago

If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so? It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales. The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so?

https://oxide.computer/remote-access

It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales.

Since we sell half or full racks at a time, it's true that we're geared towards larger companies, as small shops just don't need that much computer.

The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.

That's the use case, yep!

LeoPanthera• 12 months ago

I know that this isn't their mission so I'm not really complaining, but man, if they ever start to offer smaller homelab-scale stuff, they can have all my money.

doctorpangloss9• 12 months ago

One POV is their model doesn’t work for small purchases period. It’s not so much a hardware or software vendor so much as an IT agency. Which can be good venture businesses! Of course, everyone looking at this problem thinks, to make a small cost offering: that’s what a cloud is. Oxide’s problem statement says something like AWS doesn’t “make sense.” It makes way more sense than Oxide. The problem with AWS isn’t that it is bad, it’s that Amazon is greedy.

kortilla4• 12 months ago

Oxide is a fully closed ecosystem. The product seems cool but it sucks from an open computing perspective.

The “iPhone” of the data center.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

What would you like to see open that isn't? The major thing I can think of is not opening up like, our CAD files for the hardware. But that's pretty far away from your characterization.

wmf2• 12 months ago

It's open source (that effectively requires the rack as a dongle) but not flexible or modular in any way. There's not even a single PCIe slot AFAIK.

wetwater• 12 months ago

If only they bring back their "On the metal" podcast. That podcast scratched an itch I didnt knew I had .

bcantrill6• 12 months ago

Check out Oxide and Friends[0]! We've been doing it for several years now, and it's a much more flexible format that allows the team to be heard in its own voice -- and allows us to weigh in on whatever's on our collective mind.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

derangedHorse• 12 months ago

After scrolling the site for 5 minutes, I still don't understand what they do. Do they offer on-prem servers? Then how does it bring cloud scalability? Is their selling point modular computer components so that you can order things online to achieve cloud scalability? Whatever it is, I expect it to have a poor user experience if I can't find a simple 'about' page.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

Do they offer on-prem servers?

Yes.

Then how does it bring cloud scalability?

You buy an entire (or half) rack at a time, and then can treat the entire thing as one elastic pool of resources, you do not need to manage the individual sleds within the server yourself. Your interface to the rack is similar to a VPS provider, it's "give me a new vm with these specs."

Happy to elaborate if you have more questions.

ksec• 12 months ago

I am wondering what they have on Roadmap and if Zen 6 will come. Their AMD EPYC™ 7713P is 4+ years old already. Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it?

In 2027 - 2030, We will have 256 Core Zen 7 CPU with PCIe 6.0 or 7.0 SSD and Network. If Liquid Cooling ever come to Oxide we are looking at 5 - 10x the compute power of its current hardware.

Somewhere along the line a Single Oxide Rack would offer enough Compute and Storage for 95% of customers. And whenever I think about having Solaris in every rack just put a smile on my face.

wmf2• 12 months ago

They've been working on Zen 5 Turin for a while so hopefully soon they'll only be 1 year behind.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it?

It's more of that we're a young company, so we can only do so much, so quickly. Plus, because we do so much custom work, that all takes time. As we grow and scale up, we'll be able to move forward more quickly on updates on the hardware front.

jeron• 12 months ago

at any rate, I'm looking forward to decommissioned Oxide racks making it into my homelab for pennies on the dollar

sailfast2• 12 months ago

Is this a government run VC firm? Next gen In-Q-Tel? Makes sense for highly classified workloads on-prem and there’s a lot of demand for that.

Could be a need for unclassified workloads also… but curious if this is a defense and Intel community venture fund backing this next round with my tax dollars.

tgtweak2• 12 months ago

Likely government-adjacent and with high portfolio use case match. These orgs are less and less keen on shifting sensitive workloads to public clouds - even "gov clouds". Let's not forget that the best access control is to have no access, and that obscurity is actually a form of security especially in a world where effort put on vulnerability searching is proportionate to popularity. The odds of someone discovering and exploiting your obscurely coded and privately hosted oxide stack are orders of magnitude smaller than someone compromising your public cloud.

USIT > U.S. Innovative Technology (“USIT”) is an investment firm that backs growth-stage commercial companies with critical technologies relevant to the national interest, including, artificial intelligence, future of compute, new industry, space & communications, bio & healthcare, and defense tech. USIT was founded by American technologist and visionary investor Thomas Tull.

joined by: Riot Ventures, Eclipse, Jane Street

tgtweak2• 12 months ago

I can tell Bryan wrote this by the vocabulary... Congrats on the traction - haven't had a use case for rack-scale infra yet but hopefully soon!

uberdru• 12 months ago

I always believed in Bryan, but the day i heard the buzzword "cloud repatriation", I know there was a market.

jiveturkey3• 12 months ago

We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing.

In exchange for your own hardware purchase cost, in practical terms also a license.

We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party.

In exchange for an unbreakable dependency on the first-party solution.

I'm being overly aggressive because I do lurve your product and the Sun/Apple way of vertical integration is especially valuable for security ... things break at the interfaces and since you have absolute control over that, you can be actually good. Then there's the improved UX that comes with an integrated product. The root of trust work you've done is especially noteworthy, in a sea of also especially noteworthy efforts across the entire vertical product.

But I'm leery that with the absolute lock-in, and VC pressure, you might succumb to squeezing your customers a la AVGO.

macgillicu• 12 months ago

This is great. I hope they stay committed to the open source side of things, but all evidence seems to suggest they're serious about it. Generally, it's great to see a good idea getting executed well and arguably improving the state of affairs in computing, and making it, as it were.

The flat salary structure at a generous level (from my perspective, anyway) is a breath of fresh air. Everyone getting caught up on the equity is a bit hard to understand, given the clarity of the message from the company.

I will be applying for one of the open positions. Kudos to this company for their approach to business, and congrats on the success.

mkoubaa• 12 months ago

In the end, the mainframe wins

panick21_6• 12 months ago

Their product isn't at all like a mainframe.

zozbot2345• 12 months ago

Their MVP is of course lacking the reliability and availability features of mainframes. But future products will probably improve on this POV and intrude into the existing mainframe space.

hinkley5• 12 months ago

Big bump up in open positions now. Unfortunately none I'm particularly attuned for.

mmeto• 12 months ago

Congrats!

purpleidea• 12 months ago

Building sovereign systems management with low overhead is an incredibly important goal. For this I salute them for pursuing that path. However their mistake is that it's a hardware problem. It's actually almost entirely a software problem, modulo convincing some hardware vendors to make their ILOM/IPMI implementations not be buggy or suck.

Disclosure, I work in the software automation space.

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

We are doing both hardware and software. We don’t use vendor IPMI stuff, and have instead implemented our own stack for it. You’re absolutely right!

syntheticgate4• 12 months ago

Our thesis is that it's both a hardware and software problem! Which, as steve said, is why we're doing both. We can look at designs across the whole stack, from chips chosen, FPGA implementations, hubris management and control plane software to accomplish this goal. By doing these together, we can accomplish fundamentally different designs and tighter integration than any one of those multi-company silos can even if they tried to work together.

neumann• 12 months ago

Is there a clear hardware upgrade path? Couldn't see it obviously on the website.

The on-prem cloud is definitely the holy grail for many of us, but the justification to the capex and ongoing commitment to owning the hardware would be that it has have just as easy an upgrade path.

sudomateo5• 12 months ago

Hey! The current generation rack is compatible with the current generation compute sleds, switch, and power shelves. The next-generation compute sleds will be compatible as well. Possibly the next-generation switch but I would have to defer to my colleagues for that answer.

We'll ultimately ship a next-generation rack to take advantage of changing constraints (e.g., physical form factor, power requirements) and we'll provide a mechanism for upgrading to that generation of rack as well. Likely, in the form of multi-rack connectivity to move workloads or perhaps even financial incentives to purchase the latest and greatest.

I don't work on the hardware side at Oxide so I don't have further details to share. Great question!

pyuser583• 12 months ago

It’s funny how we are knee deep in the next “big thing” (AI), and still haven’t made the last “big thing” (cloud computing) generally accessible.

It should be trivial to create my own S3 bucket that’s stores data on my laptop.

I’m really glad folks like Oxide are moving in that direction.

But it seems when there’s enough money in something, openness goes out the window.

didip• 12 months ago

This is the first time I learned about their differentiating factors. Pretty cool.

danavar• 12 months ago

is this just a purchasable version of Borg? kubernetes on steroids?

tiffanyh• 12 months ago

I appreciate the craftsmanship of Oxide — it’s like a finely handcrafted Swiss watch.

I just hope they can survive in a world dominated by relatively inexpensive, general-purpose Apple Watches.

throwmeaway222• 12 months ago

I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events.

So what is Oxide and why would I use that over OpenStack?

steveklabnik48• 12 months ago

OpenStack is software. Oxide is selling hardware + software, made together. We believe that's a better approach.

throw0101c6• 12 months ago

I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events.

Still releasing software twice a year:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack

Available as open source so you can self-deploy, or go with a vendor if you want some hand-holding / support:

* https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/

Perhaps they were "everywhere" when they were newer and needed to get their name out there, but nowadays they're more established and so will come up in search and such as an option for those that want to run cloud (either for their internal needs, or as the basis of a public product offering).

suprgeek• 12 months ago

In the era of anything even remotely AI-adjacent raising ridiculous amount of money - and proving to vaporware - this is one raise that makes me happy. We need more of the Bryan mindset (and less of Larry) to ensure that when the AI-Enabled future shows up we have some semblance of a fair society that works for all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s

Our $100M Series B

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