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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this a while back, does that help? Happy to elaborate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324

Seems like Oxide is aiming to be the Apple of the enterprise hardware (which isn't too surprising given the background of the people involved - Sun used to be something like that as were other fully-integrated providers, though granted that Sun didn't write Unix from scratch). Almost like coming to a full circle from the days where the hardware and the software was all done in an integrated fashion before Linux turned-up and started to run on your toaster.

From your referenced comment:

> The rack isn't built in such a way that you can just pull out a sled and shove it into another rack; the whole thing is built in a cohesive way.

> other vendors will sell you a rack, but it's made up of 1U or 2U servers, not designed as a cohesive whole, but as a collection of individual parts

What I'm curious about is how analogous or different is this cohesiveness to the days where vendors built the complete system? Is that the main selling point or there are nuances to it?

The holistic design is certainly a big piece of it. While we certainly admire aspects of both Apple and Sun (and we count formerly-Apple and formerly-Sun among our employees), we would also differentiate ourselves from both companies in critical dimensions:

- Oxide is entirely open where Apple is extraordinarily secretive: all of our software (including the software at the lowest layers of the stack!) is open source, and we encourage Oxide employees to talk publicly about their work.

- Oxide is taking a systems approach where Sun sold silo'd components: I have written about this before[0], but Sun struggled to really build whole systems. For Oxide, we have made an entire rack-level system that includes both hardware and software: the abstraction to the operator is as turn-key elastic infrastructure rather than as a kit car.

We have tried to take the best of both companies (and for that matter, the best of all the companies we have worked) to deliver what customers want: a holistic system to deploy and operate on-premises infrastructure.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

Oxide is the only exciting and refreshing technology product company I know of today. I've been rooting from the sidelines for years now, I want Oxide to succeed wildly so I can hopefully be a customer at some point.

Thanks for the perspective. That begs the request (and this despite your point about everything being open source) - you guys should share the differentiating highlights of the monitoring gains you have achieved from this level of integration - it'll help those who are not able to dive into the source code and extract/summarize this aspect. I think it'll be a good showcase to everyone else of the additional benefits that come out of this approach.

Yes, good idea! In terms of monitoring, we have made component selection that allows for monitoring (e.g., PMBus for power rails) -- and then built the software into our SP that pulls that information and makes it available upstack via our management network.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE_9zsAadE

Apple or Sun are common comparisons, yes :)

> What I'm curious about is how analogous or different is this cohesiveness to the days where vendors built the complete system?

To be honest, that was before my personal time. I was a kid in that era, using ultra hand-me-down hardware. I'd speculate that one large difference is that hardware was much, much simpler back then.

Perfect - now get that 2nd paragraph on the landing page somehow!

I don't really understand how having a larger minimum purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP. Your comments explain the emphasis on tighter integration across the stack, but it doesn't clearly show why this is a benefit.

What are the problems people are having with existing systems (like Vxrail), and how does Oxide fix those? What stories are you hearing?

> I don't really understand how having a larger minimum purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP.

For some organizations cattle-like pizza boxes or chassis with blade systems are still not cattle-like enough. By making the management unit the entire rack you can reduce overhead (at least compared to a rack of individual servers, even if they are treated like cattle).

There are vendors that will drop ship entire (multiple) racks pre-wired and pre-configured for various scenarios (especially HPC): just provide power, (water) cooling, and a network uplink.

I wouldn't say that a larger purchase unit is a USP; it is an underlying reason why other USPs are able to be delivered. This is an engineering focused place, so I tended to focus on the engineering aspects.

My sibling commentor just left a great answer to your second question, so I'll leave that one there :)

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