A modern rack contains many computers. We use both our own lil embedded OS, Hubris, as well as our own illumos distribution named Helios.
None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though. You run VMs with whatever you want.
None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though. You run VMs with whatever you want.
What about security updates and bug fixes? No platform is perfect, after all...
Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line... would the hardware be repurposeable? Or would it just become a large paperweight?
Security is an important part of the product. You'll get updates.
> Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years down the line
All of the software, to the degree that we are able to, is open source. This is important precisely because you own the hardware; you as a customer deserve to know what we put on it.
The mainframe is optimized for reliability and compatibility foremost and does things that are quite unlike most other classes of machines even "high end servers", including RAIM (RAID for memory), and the ability to stop a failed processor and move its checkpointed state to another processor and resume it transparently from software point of view, and generally employing quite hardened circuits and strong error detection and correction throughout the system.
There are some guesses at $500k for this Oxide rack, not sure if that even gets your phone call returned for a low end mainframe with much less compute power and memory installed. High end configurations rumored to be many millions.
This thing is more a competitor to "scale-out" / "cloud" / "webscale" / etc., at least on the hardware front (they seem to do a lot more on software/firmware side than typical such hardware vendors).
However. The kind of customer who spends this type of money can be conservative. They already have to go with on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in the same market segment uses.
Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here?
Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid it's being stretched a lot.
Thanks!
> However.
Yes. These things are challenges, but that doesn't mean they're insurmountable. I am confident that we can overcome them.
> Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or harder sell here?
I am not in enterprise sales, so I couldn't tell you :) Oxide has those people, I'm not just one of them.
In addition, app teams (i.e. the folks who deliver revenue to the business) are more productive on public cloud. They don't file tickets, they make VMs. Oxide is intended to bring the hardware, software, and interface innovations of the cloud into enterprise data centers with greater reliability and lower TCO.