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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.

I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).

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Managing a single commodity device is pretty simple. Could even be a shell script with a few IPMI commands.

Managing 100s of devices from a mix of vendors is possible becomes itself a massive ball of crap to stick all the pieces together.

Then add firmware management because now there is a plethora of firmware updates to worry about.

And then dealing with networking discovery & orchestration for such setups is an added horror few even try to visualize.

Then abstract all these differences away so one can provision two different vendor’s servers connected to two different vendor’s managed switches in different racks to a new VLAN. And do it with SR-IOV while you’re at it…

Oh, I forgot shared storage… details, details…

Commodity computing is the modern day Tower of Babel.

Yes, it can be done much simpler if one treats all switches as unmanaged, all storage as local, and all networking as flat. That’s just not acceptable for a lot of use cases though…

Good question. Can’t eliminate the BIOS/UEFI on commodity systems. Can’t remove/cut down the BMC. Can’t plumb the hardware root of trust into the OS and VMs. Can’t do dynamic rack-level power capping (future roadmap). There’s a whole bunch of the software stack that only works because the hardware and software were designed together.

Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.

> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.

There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.

Which only matters to consumers. Businesses at scale have teams doing this stuff and costs matter.

I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.

The market is anyone who wants a private cloud but isn’t as big as an Amazon or Google who could build it themselves. Seems like a big enough TAM.

> I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.

You may not have heard, but the US government just prints money.

Banks make a lot of it, too.

... and Anthropic for instance.

If large corps see the value and build whole data-centers with oxide racks, a few large costumers alone can be huge.

I suspect part of this raise has to with Antropic using Oxide at pretty large scale.

If its really true that things will move from public cloud to private in large scale, its not narrow at all.

And they have a pretty clear fitting product range they can expand into.

It's not actually secret — it's open source! We talk openly about our architecture.

Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s

Their machines are x86 but they've rearchitected basically everything else in the pursuit of a cohesive and integrated machine, they don't even have a BIOS. The secret sauce is having full control of the software stack, and as close to full control of the firmware as is possible on x86.

What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM.

(Former oxide)

Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.

I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but

> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint

That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.

EDIT: here’s another commentor with an example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176704

Complete hardware and software and firmware BOM. You won't get that anywhere.

> Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to.

Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.

> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers?

It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)

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