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Oxide and Friends 7/3/2023 -- Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!

Oxide Computer Company

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
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  • Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

4.4K views3 years ago2 recommendations

HardwareSystems programmingOperating systemsCPUs and computer architectureStartups

The Oxide team answers community questions about building a hardware startup, shipping their first rack, and choosing the illumos operating system.

Context: mastodon.social/@oxidecomputer@hachyderm.io/1106469146906636… Notes: github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2023_…

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into building a hardware startup and the engineering decisions behind the Oxide rack.

faitswulffon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Oxide Computer, an efficient rack-scale computing system”

One benefit is that they're competing in an industry where the time to get a sled up and running for compute can be measured in weeks (they say they've heard up to 90 days) whereas their solution is basically plug and play - Bryan was trying to get Steve to admit set up took "hours" whereas Steve was hedging and saying customers could get started "within a week." They go into more details on their podcast, and this section in particular covers the bootstrap time: link to this video Pretty fascinating stuff.
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cnston Hacker News • Recommends

On “OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution”

> link to this video Great episode! The Dell PERC "parity issue" "you're the only customer having this issue" story is hilarious, reminds me of my own experience getting support over the years as a non-Windows user! Sadly, today, "non-Windows" is simply being replaced with "non-Linux", so, if you run BSD or Illumos, it's still the same issues. Oxide Computer is great, I really do hope they succeed, because it does seem like an uphill battle!
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bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?”

We have talked quite a bit about what it's like to be making hardware as a startup in our Oxide and Friends podcast0 -- and one might be especially interested in the Q&A we did on Monday1 after our launch got quite a bit of attention here on HN.2 0 link 1 link to this video 2 link
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bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives”

Yes! There are lots of ways in which we are nothing like these big IBM systems (we are, for example, entirely open -- like POWER, but very unlike AS/400 or Z series machines), but we definitely admire the robustness of these machines! Indeed, arguably to a fault, as I likened us to the AS/400 in a VC pitch0 -- which (despite the potential accuracy of the historical analogue) is as ill-advised as it sounds... 0 link to this video
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bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Day in the Life of an IPv6 Packet on Illumos”

Not unrelated, of course -- but it was certainly not the foregone conclusion that you might expect!0 0 link to this video
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bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack”

Keep in mind that Helios is really just an implementation detail of the rack; like Hubris0, it's not something visible to the user or to applications. (The user of the rack provisions VMs.) As for why an illumos derivative and not something else, we expanded on this a bit in our Q&A when we shipped our first rack1 -- and we will expand on it again in the (recorded) discussion that we will have later today.2 0 link 1 link to this video 2 link
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ubedanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution”

"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do." I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability. One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here: link link to this video
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