Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour
explorer.oxide.computer
explorer.oxide.computer
Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.
I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.
but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
It sounds from the outside like Oxide has an interview process that requires some low level engineering work to be delivered? Maybe I got that wrong.
As usual, I'm assuming the assignment is evaluated based on a reasonable time-commitment. From what the recruiting experts tell me, it's a good strategy to spend as much time as possible, the deliverable is better, and the optics aren't bad either, it signals investment into the application instead of signalling spray and pray application broadcasting.
Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. One of employees repeatedly rebutted that claim in the comments, and they did this for quite a few commenters. Was a not a good look. I doubt much has improved since then as seeing the comments below confirms the same mess.
Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.
How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?
I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault.
How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).
I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.
DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something.
Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum).
Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified.
Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen.
The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me.
Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.
And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.
You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.
You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.
Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
Peak humanity.
I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.
Like a human does.
> Reminds me of something I heard once.
>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
I was actually about to make the same joke.
Do not mix up opportunity and capability.
If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?
You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.
It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.
No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.
> If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?
It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its reliability, repeatability, and if that signal blinds you from other indicators or maybe even leads you astray.
Having a signal doesn't mean it's particularly useful. Example: like triggering an alert on a VMs cpu utilization. It's certainly a signal but rarely is it good for anything or actionable.
> No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.
Really, I read it as if it's a bad thing, but a true thing.
Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.
Treating people with nuance and balance is not easy to do at scale, you have to bias along some axis, and nearly every axis I can think of is a shitty one- because of course there are fantastic people outside of those axis'
The best engineers I have ever worked with mostly didn't either finish college or even go in the first place. Entirely self taught.
So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?
It was for an investment bank though and they have essentially unlimited money. I can't imagine any of the other companies I've worked for would be remotely generous enough to do the same.
You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?
I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.
Once you're in the door, service should be good/great.
All companies have to do is just be more transparent. Ie, we have a backlog of 1000 applicants. Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed.
Ghosting people who've "gotten in the door" and spent a considerable of time interviewing is extremely disrespectful.
> Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed.
The standard time given is four to six weeks. I haven't worked there in a long time, so I can't speak to how true that currently is, but sometimes it does take longer than that. Just like the materials are a lot of work to produce, they are also a lot of work to read, and they're read by multiple people.
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.
It's a fair bit of writing to ask for, but for a mostly remote and prose-driven company, you do a lot of long-form writing in the day to day work. The public RFDs and github issues/comments/commits give a good flavor for this.
As others have said, lots of my work is open source, and I have public writings and talks, so finding those were much easier for me than it might be for someone with only closed source works.
Got boilerplate-rejected with zero human interaction three months later.
This is long for sure, but this is the guidance given on the Careers page:
> All candidates will receive a response, but this takes time: multiple Oxide employees review every candidate and their materials. We process applications in the order received, and so the length of time may vary. 4-6 weeks is pretty normal, but it can be longer than that for positions that are particularly oversubscribed. We'll try to give you a sense of how long it will take when you apply. This is generally the longest part of the process.
It is never something that is quick.
> with zero human interaction
This, on the other hand, is completely expected. As that page says
> If, based on your materials, we believe that there is a likely fit, we will work with you to schedule one-on-one conversations with people from across the company.
Everything is very front-loaded in the Oxide process. Hundreds (I left a long time ago at this point, could be thousands at this point, I dunno) of people submit materials, but the only conversations that happen are with the handful of people who are in final consideration. 99% of people don't ever do an in-person interview.
This has various pros and cons for candidates: for example, if you're very personable in person, but struggle with writing, the process is going to be hard on you. The counterpoint is that Oxide is specifically interested in people who can write well, because the written word is a huge part of the job. As an applicant, this structure is a pro because you will never get the "I did 10 interviews and then received a rejection" that can happen at companies that do multiple rounds of reviews: the vast majority of people don't make it past the first step, and there's a second and sometimes a third step, but that's it. The latency may be high, but the throughput is good.
> Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.
…but in practice it's just boilerplate and silence. Good luck asking when no one's listening [1].
Lots of companies do that, too. The problem is that this approach feels even more unfair than when it's a more "regular" hiring flow. Oxide asks for a very high level of effort from their applicants, but you can see in these comments that at the same time they are quite far towards the lower end of how much visible effort they commit back to the applicants (delays, boilerplate, ghosting).
And sure, as you say it's hundreds-to-thousands of applications, and potentially dozens-to-hundreds of emails to reply to. But the additional time it takes to send a one line reply pales in comparison to thoughtfully reading 12+ pages of materials, which they say they do. I just don't think that adding a few percent on top of that massive effort is unrealistic. It's an active decision to save time and money on people who didn't pass the first stage; I think it's an unethical decision, but then I'm not nearly as successful as Bryan Cantrill.
[1]: To be fair, Bryan kindly advised to "DM" him for feedback in a similar thread half a year ago. There are no DMs on here, so I DM'd on bsky and tried to guess his email, but I probably guessed wrong and he doesn't check his bsky DMs.
To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.
And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0])
It's just very funny to lead with that is all.
[0] https://www.information-age.com/mcnealy-and-ellison-usher-in...
A good rule of thumb is to always ask to see the cap table as an early employee. Question them when they don’t. Probably not so much with 0xide at series C, but definitely demand it at preseed and series A.
Hope all is good with you bro
> That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?
Your response is not a response to the OP's claim. The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-process. And that others said the same.
But even beyond that, your response doesn't align with your own careers page's "Hiring Process":
> If candidates aren’t advanced into interviews by the process outlined in [rfd147], an explicit rejection should be sent. The level of oversubscription for Oxide roles means that this rejection will likely be non-specific — which is naturally frustrating for applicants that have put a lot of energy into their materials. Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.
Which would be in alignment:
> Decency
> We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.
Here you just come off quite defensive, and argue that you at are Oxide are "very clear about" things that you say quite the opposite about on the very directions you tell candidates to read.
If what you say is true - and I can absolutely believe it is - fine, update the docs and the site. But don't come here and gaslight people into "I don't understand the problem. We're very clear, we've been very clear, people should not be complaining about this."
Eh, if even a small percentage of those emails end up in a spam folder then there are going to be people who think that they were ghosted. They didn’t ghost me. Alas, they didn’t hire me either.
Investing 6 hours into applying for a position should warrant a response beyond 'we are going to pass'
But generally, the more demands you put on a first round, the less likely I am to apply. I've seen companies asking for 8-10 multi-paragraph each long form answers to even get to a hiring screen. For one recent application, this was one of the questions, of eight: "Describe a time when you had to make a tradeoff in roadmap items. Describe each option and their merits, and the decision-making criteria you used. Describe what stakeholders you spoke with and how their input influenced you. Describe how you communicated this with the team, and customers. Be specific about all points and clear on the exact role you played in this process."
People can say "well, it's a good screen because if you won't put effort into that, will you put effort into your work", but if your argument is that you need to do such things because you get 500-1,000+ applicants per position, you're going to have a hard job convincing me that a human reads every one of those, and not just the subset that are not automatically routed to the trash by your ATS and/or AI.
So my end retort to that is "well, it's a good marker of the level of respect I can be expect to be treated with as an employee".
Have some respect, be human.
Humans doing human things
Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
When I was there, there were often very tough decisions, where we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates. The math means that you are inherently turning down some excellent people.
The response was particularly unclear - was I rejected outright? Did I slip through the cracks and then the role got filled by someone else? Should I reapply, or am I not a fit for company culture? Or just maybe not a fit for the role? If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it? Like, is it me or is is it you?
Even when I applied to Google (a famously 'bad' recruitment experience according to most) I was able to at least regularly talk to a human who would give me feedback from interviews. And when there was a lack of team fit they'd tell me so clearly and help me look for another role. They treated me like a human! Like, I could talk to someone! Oxide just gave me a canned answer without a signature attached and no way to actually talk to anyone.
Oh well, in the meantime I've actually found a meaningful job where the recruitment experience didn't feel like I'm just throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean and hoping to get a response.
I think that there's a certain deeper truth in what you've posted, which is that hiring is very hard, and different people feel different ways about different things. I also applied to Google once upon a time, and it was spectacularly confusing and bad. Yeah, I could speak to humans, but that wasn't particularly helpful. I regularly received contradictory information, and the stalling and back and forth went on so long I completed several other processes during the wait, and ended up at Cloudflare instead. That doesn't mean that you're wrong that you had a better time than I did, it just is what it is.
I know you're not looking, but to give you my take on the biggest question here, in case anyone else is curious:
> If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it?
In general, resubmitting with the same materials isn't a good idea. If they didn't get you in the first time, they won't the next time, and also in general, time has passed, you've probably done other things since then... naturally, this means the answers will end up differently.
Being civil and considerate to people who are in your process spending many hours is not hard. Give them updates. Not a fit? Tell them. Plans have changed and the role is gone/changes so they won’t even fully consider you? Yell them. Buried under other work and don’t have the time to evaluate them? Tell them.
> Give them updates.
But you have to consider that different processes mean different ability to even give updates. Yes, saying "give me updates" is a good thing, but a side effect of the process that Oxide uses means that there is high latency for taking an initial look at an application. In that time, there's simply nothing to update you on. More traditional hiring practices have more stages, with faster feedback for candidates, and that's one pro of the way that they do things.
> Not a fit? Tell them.
People are told "no", but again, due to the above, it can take a while before this evaluation even happens.
> Plans have changed and the role is gone/changes so they won’t even fully consider you?
This does not happen at Oxide, roles are very carefully considered, and as a smaller startup, tend to be more general. There isn't the sort of re-org shuffling that happens at large organizations.
> Buried under other work and don’t have the time to evaluate them?
This is why Oxide makes it clear that this takes a long time, up front. It is a tremendous amount of work for Oxide to run their process.
Although I suppose you're saying that promising candidates are kept on file for later?
> we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates
Under my interpretation , these statements contradict each other. The former implies that a candidate's failure is always the result of their shortcomings. The latter implies that a qualified candidate can be edged out through little fault of their own. The parent poster complained of exactly this; they weren't sure whether they were ineligible or simply edged out.
Having looked at the process (RFD 3 and original post on dtrace.org), and contextualizing it with the oversubscribed-problem (which was mentioned somewhere else in this thread), I cannot help but think that there is a kind of solution that can help both the applicants and oxide and (yes) the industry as a whole.
The kinds of materials that the RFD asks for, seems like it would make for very interesting reading, regardless of whether it is read by a hiring-manager or a computer nerd. So why not, instead of (or in addition to) writing 11 pages, and sending them to the inbox of someone who (even without the additional responsibility of sorting thousands of applications in order hire-ability) is already extremely busy (this is, after all, a very demanding job), you publish them on your webpage?
In addition to taking some of the pressure off the oxide hiring-pipeline, you also get more exposure to people, who may work at organizations that would benefit from such a pipeline, but cannot afford to burn the political capital to replace the old pipeline. In a way, people who would appreciate your materials would, over some amount of time (and time should not be an issue, because it seems like it takes (at least sometimes) a long time for oxide to respond anyway), find them and possibly reach out.
I am basically a nobody, but if people started publishing things in the format of an oxide application, I would _totally_ read them. I am not saying I would necessarily _like_ them, but I would certainly read them[1]. Also, if disclosure is an issue, people can be published pseudonymously.
[1]: If for no other reason, than to see the multitude funny ways in which other people are wrong ;)
In case it gets deleted, I've quoted what bcantrill said below.
"I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?
To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers."
It was also embarrassing to listen to the podcast episode where you humiliated that Eastern European guy you had invited. All very off putting and it really tarnish the brand.
You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it.
Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.
It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter.
> That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it)
I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.
I don't expect anybody to have any sympathy for the plight of nerd-popular and well-capitalized tech companies. I'm only saying that understanding all the accurate descriptive claims about these processes will help you make better predictions about the world. "I got ghosted by Oxide" is in fact not a very useful input to the question of how they treat their team.
I don't need to work there (nor do I feel like I'm smart or talented enough to)-- I just wish I could work with the Oxide gear in Customer engagement, too. I don't work with businesses big enough to need it, sadly. It looks so sweet.
This is what I think of when I think of utility-scale compute-- not racks of Supermicro / Dell / HP boxes with tiny ISA buses hiding on traces on their motherboards for "baseboard management controllers" to plug into to pretend to be PC AT keyboards.
I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.
Network with people at the company and third time may be a charm. Maybe.
That doesn't mean this isn't bad advice overall, but it doesn't give you any structural leg-up with Oxide specifically.
Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day.
Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite and well-capitalised of companies.
it's bring a new mentality of owning instead of renting.
however - I feel like the industry is what's letting them down.
had posted this earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687341 - on whether Multi-core is dead.
because these racks - it means - you've to embrace putting the hardware to work. which I don't think the industry is willing to do or able to.
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here.
Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example).
What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.
Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.
So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.
But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does is tiny.
And if you own more then 1, like an entire rack, then do you even care? Because above some scale you're just going to wheel the rack out rather then go and pull individual units.
Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).
Loved the idea of blade servers, but they were targeted to people who needed very high compute in small footprints, and we both didn't have high compute requirements and were power/footprint constrained (we could get more power but cost/watt would go up because of cooling density).
The Twin^2 was nice because it amortized the cost of redundant power supplies over 4 machines, but didn't have the cost overhead of big backplanes or fancy layouts to get a lot of CPU+RAM in a small physical space.
Once populated a 4 node chassis was around $750/node including CPU and RAM and 2x SATA drives, it was within $100 of the price of a similar 1U server. We had around 10 cabinets in a data center when I left the company. It was, IMHO, a pretty good deal to get a dedicated box with 24x7 monitoring and sysadmin services including updates and backups at $150/mo.
It was implemented with User Mode Linux, a Linux kernel ported to run under Linux instead of ported to a bare machine. A crazy idea, but it worked REALLY well. I remember finishing up the sign-up and billing software on the plane on the way to US PyCon where we announced the service, though I don't remember the year.
Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.
Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.
To me, from someone that has worked for orgs that either would have been or are customers of Oxide - You need to be thinking more about the complete package. You are thinking about a tiny piece.
OTOH, much of the cost saving of less cabling was eaten up by the vendor charging higher prices for equipment like HCA's or switches compatible with the blade enclosure. And unless you went for a fully non-blocking IB fabric there were a bunch of unused IB switch ports.
Also, while the blade enclosure had this fancy web GUI for management, at scale we had built our OOB management automation around IPMI anyway, so this wasn't a feature worth much for us. If anything it was a bit of a chore, as in the cases when we needed to do something which IPMI wasn't capable of, there was an extra step of figuring out the node->chassis mapping to know which chassis to connect to, and then figuring out which blade in the chassis corresponded to the node in question.
For the next generation we got these "twin" systems manufactures had started coming out with, with 4 nodes in a 2U chassis. A bit more cabling than the blade systems, but in the end it was somewhat cheaper.
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
There are systems which have similar overall hardware designs, but they are usually integrating a large amount of hardware and software from multiple vendors. Oxide is much closer to "everything is produced by Oxide."
I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the shelf units for networking, storage, etc. Yes, you could mix and match different components based on your needs, but that also meant that there were extra wires, cables, mounting rails, and more importantly - all these different components ran a mix of software that had to integrate using common denominator protocols and speeds.
Steve rightly mentioned the integration below, and I didn't put it in my message because I kinda assumed that we include software in this discussion too.
HP in 2005 had an army of programmers writing all sorts of firmware and software and another army of hardware engineers, too. They could have made an Oxide computer back then, and it would sell really well. But they didn't, and none of their competitors did despite this being an obvious product (in hindsight), an THIS is what I find interesting.
That's what's so cool about Oxide's boxes to me-- the legacy garbage is gone and the strange undefined behavior part and parcel with overlapping edge cases will be minimized (and managed, as opposed to used as an excuse by a vendor). Dealing with incompatibilities and strange firmware interactions have made me come to see PC-based servers as a weird opposite of the "Swiss cheese" model. The various layers of interacting hardware, firmware, drivers, and OS act as a kind of "filter" for correct operation. When you swap or add one of these component you get one or more exciting new layers in the stack that, hopefully, have "holes" aligning with the existing.
The storage market used to be dominated by Oxide-style vertical integration and bespoke engineering and almost every vendor has transitioned to modularity over the last 20 years. Pure Storage seems to be doing OK with custom hardware though, so maybe the rest of the industry just has a lack of courage.
Their customers think so.
(Think governments, security-serious applications, critical workloads, science, energy, financial, etc.)
Some if it may even get sent to labs first for disassembly and inspection. Other times it may never ever be plugged in to an internet connection.
For these customers, the feature set, supply chain ownership, integration and support is everything.
This sounds like less of a problem for DCs with bare concrete flooring, but blades did fell out of fashion, so I guess the fractions of DCs with multiple levels or free-access floors were higher than anticipated.
(Also, maybe I'm just being an amateur, but I'd be scared of tolerance stacking with a "grape bunch" design like this. Individually enclosed chassis with cables and cage nuts are a lot more robust against dimensional issues)
I prefer to think of that was "datacenter weren't ready for denser workloads"; blades were ahead of their time, and their adoption wasn't great because of that. Since then, new datacenters have been built with more ambitious power/cooling/weight budgets.
We need to get it cross-linked from the main site still.
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis?
In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights.
But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors.
You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL.
How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
>How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
Absolutely zero inside knowledge of course, but I think Oxide's approach has intermingled pros and cons. The only real con I can see, but it is a real one, is that one basic argument against unreliability at higher levels is standardization/commoditization. If some big player sells you a standard rack and setup, then gets blocked from further support or otherwise dies, you can just swap in whatever else. Vertical integration and customization offers real benefits but also more dependency, even if things are open unless the niche becomes big enough that other players get interested.
On the other hand, the Oxide approach is also positive thanks to that seem openness and integration. They can offer safe software and firmware up and down the stack in a way others cannot. They can offer assurance not just about one piece but around much or all of the stack. I think there's quite a few layers of insecure mystery meat in the standardized stuff most of us run when you start digging down into it. And of course there is no cloud dependency at all, a European organization can buy their kit have full on-premise control no matter what. While the answer for new "3rd party in another jurisdiction can be pressured to screw with you even if you aren't" worries will probably most often be "go to a cloud provider exclusively under your own jurisdiction instead" Oxide seems like they could have a window there as well. If they're honest and give their own customers the power that more and more of the industry has been trying to take away, while also keeping down the IT cost load as a cloud would, that seems like an argument for some?
Oxide sounds really good on paper but for the export version there will most likely be some foot angles, and I can't see many EU companies taking this leap of faith.
> and their backdoors
One thing about Oxide's product is that it significantly eliminates a lot of these sorts of vectors. Pretty much every part of the rack that can be is open source, for example. That BMC from other vendors that have a full OS running inside, where you have no clue what it's doing? You can go look at what does that job over here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
The root of trust means that you know that nothing has been tampered with, and that attestation is threaded up through into the host OS, which pretty much nobody else that I know of is doing.
I don't know what the current thinking is around this issue all of the events you're talking about happened after I left. But the stance was always that it's your hardware, you own it, and you should know what's running on it. That's also why there's no continual licensing fees, you're buying this, not renting it.
Source: I run a startup that recently did our datacenter buildout. At no point were we at all interested in a single integrated vendor.
NVIDIA has one primary weakness here: GPUs are NOT optimal hardware for training or inference. No competitor has the market reach to challenge them though. An open standard supported by high growth, breakout startup would change that though.
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
EDIT: typos
Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
I have complex feelings about it all too. My hope is we'll re-consider what's considered hard. As a designer who started his career after the advent of digital typesetting, some of the things I barely think about were once considered difficult.
The Computer Sled is an 2U unit. I am wondering if they could further shrink it to 1U to further increase the compute density. It will probably need a redesign that is water cooling only.
> water cooling only.
There's some comments above about water cooling, I doubt this will happen, but we'll see I guess.
If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.
Isn't it decommissioned?
Will work for tflops