Oxide Launches the World's First 'Commercial' Cloud Computer (thenewstack.io) 35
VentureBeat reports:
Thursday San Francisco-based Oxide, a startup founded by computing experts from Joyent and Dell, launched what it calls the world's first "commercial cloud computer," a rack-scale system that enterprises can own to reap the benefits and flexibility of cloud computing on-premises, right within their data center. The company believes the new offering can finally put an end to the "cloud vs on-prem" dilemma enterprises face while setting up their infrastructure...
It also announced $44 million in a series A round of funding, led by Eclipse VC with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures. Oxide plans to use this money to accelerate the adoption of its cloud computer, giving teams a new, better option to serve their customers... The round brings Oxide's total financing raised to date to $78 million.
Since 2019 Oxide has thrown a team of 60 technologists at the problem — and Thursday, Oxide also revealed an impressive list of current customers: There's the U.S. Department of Energy — specifically its Idaho National Laboratory (which has historically been involved in nuclear research) — as well as "a well-known financial services firm". Oxide also announced that within just a few months, there'll be additional installments at multiple Fortune 1000 companies. And beyond that, Oxide is also boasting that they now have "a long wait list of customers ready to install once production catches up with demand...."
Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, quipped that Oxide had "essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box...." Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide, pointed out that cloud computing "remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model." There are many reasons why an enteprise might want to own their infrastructure — security, reliability, cost, and response time/latency issues — and as Tuck sees it, "the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases.
"We are changing that."
Earlier this year on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, CTO/co-founder Bryan Cantrill remembered that when doing their compliance testing, "The folks at the compliance lab — they see a lot of servers — and they're like, 'Are you sure it's on?' Because it's so quiet!" (This June article notes that later on the podcast Cantrill argued that the acoustics of today's data centers are "almost like an odor. It is this visceral reminder that this domain has suffered for lack of real systemic holistic thinking...")
Oxide's press packet lays out other advantages for their servers. "Power usage is 2x efficient, takes up half the space, and can be up and running in just four hours instead of three months."
It also announced $44 million in a series A round of funding, led by Eclipse VC with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures. Oxide plans to use this money to accelerate the adoption of its cloud computer, giving teams a new, better option to serve their customers... The round brings Oxide's total financing raised to date to $78 million.
Since 2019 Oxide has thrown a team of 60 technologists at the problem — and Thursday, Oxide also revealed an impressive list of current customers: There's the U.S. Department of Energy — specifically its Idaho National Laboratory (which has historically been involved in nuclear research) — as well as "a well-known financial services firm". Oxide also announced that within just a few months, there'll be additional installments at multiple Fortune 1000 companies. And beyond that, Oxide is also boasting that they now have "a long wait list of customers ready to install once production catches up with demand...."
Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, quipped that Oxide had "essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box...." Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide, pointed out that cloud computing "remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model." There are many reasons why an enteprise might want to own their infrastructure — security, reliability, cost, and response time/latency issues — and as Tuck sees it, "the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases.
"We are changing that."
Earlier this year on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, CTO/co-founder Bryan Cantrill remembered that when doing their compliance testing, "The folks at the compliance lab — they see a lot of servers — and they're like, 'Are you sure it's on?' Because it's so quiet!" (This June article notes that later on the podcast Cantrill argued that the acoustics of today's data centers are "almost like an odor. It is this visceral reminder that this domain has suffered for lack of real systemic holistic thinking...")
Oxide's press packet lays out other advantages for their servers. "Power usage is 2x efficient, takes up half the space, and can be up and running in just four hours instead of three months."
well, meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Some shallow claims on performance, and nothing on the software? A lot of fluff in that announcement. Seems to me that customers want a specific environment to run their stuff, and I'm not seeing what this provides to meet that target.
Re:well, meh (Score:4, Insightful)
> nothing on the software
Dude, their github account has dozens of repos, all open source.
Very cool stuff.
Imagine (Score:5, Funny)
What is new here? (Score:5, Funny)
2010 called and wants its blade servers back.
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Nice (Score:5, Funny)
They have invented the mainframe!
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HP's Moonshot was going to do this, too. 45 blades in a box. They were going to be ARM multi-cores, but Microsoft bitch-slapped them and Intel cores were used, then it went off the rails.
And the big guns have been selling NOCs-in-a-Box for decades.
The only thing new here is how easily VC money can be burned through.
This song has been played so many times that people kick the radio when it comes on. Sheesh.
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Not just nice, efficient. (Score:3)
I've been following oxide for a while, and they're avoiding what my people currently have to deal with: racks and racks of power supplies, fans and cases, none of which contribute to actual computing.
Somewhere close to true mainframes (or perhaps M9000s), and way better than blades, where only_ some_ unneeded components are moved to the racks. PA customer once asked for racks and racks of two-socket machines. Using pairs of 32-socket machines saved approximate 1.3 Million dollars, US. No unneeded mothe
Not even half baked (Score:5, Interesting)
If their admins are able to reach into your system at will, then the security of your data entire data center is compromised, not just this system. This is not the same as an on-prem system with no external access for data protection reasons.
I work with people who would like to have an AWS or Azure "In A Box". This is not that. The closest thing seems to still be buying a system from Dell or HP with VMWare and Tanzu preinstalled.
Um, in other words, (Score:3)
Nobody ever thought of that one before. Clearly on the bleeding edge of computing.
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Choose your poison (Score:3)
Own it yourself - Have full control but be responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting and disaster recovery
Rent from someone else - Pay what they ask, accept a loss of control and the possibility of unpleasant changes
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Let's be real. Unless you have a contract signed in blood, your cloud service provider is not going to support your needs long term. They will cancel services whenever the executive team decides that some new whizbang idea is worth pursuing over the needs of a paying customer. The problem is every cloud company has sold Wall Street on the promise of exponential growth. And it turns out having paying customers is only linear growth, so basically garbage.
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If you rely on fringe value added tools and APIs from your Cloud service provider, you are designing in the potential headache.
You can accomplish the exact same pain by purchasing 3rd party software for your in house servers.
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Yeah, fringe tools like Kubernetes. Except plenty of vendors drop support for old API versions of K8s. If you are like me and have obligations to your customers for long-term support then you can't easily brush away the policies of your CSP.
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Part of the "loss of control" for Cloud services is also freedom to upgrade to new server technology when it become available without needing to replace your existing hardware investment.
The "let's do everything in house" advocates forget this, and the pain of supporting heterogeneous fleets.
If you assume an in house server has a 4 year life cycle, then your calculation should also include how much faster the Cloud server will be in perf / $$ in 3 years.
Anthos (Score:2)
GCP containers, on premise. Been running in my organization for more than 1 year.
These guys are not the first.
it's in the cloud! (Score:2)
Sure is cloudy in this basement. I hope the power or network doesn't go out and reveal that we're not actually doing anything in the cloud.
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What? (Score:2)
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This is about the substrate - computers, racks and networking.
To get a cloud, you just have to add the cloud software you want.
And if you want the worldwide scalable fault tolerant services the cloud can enable, click on the "feature request" button on the Oxide support site.
What? (Score:3)
Uh, Azure HCI? (Score:3)
Wait... (Score:1)
...you mean there's noncommercial ones?
Back to the future .. (Score:2)
Who provides the maintenance for this on-premises cloud computer. Both software and hardware.
Title. (Score:2)
I seem to remember Dell and HP being forced to ... (Score:2)
make cloud racks for Microsoft about a decade ago. They just couldn't figure out why someone would want a turn-key private cloud rack of blade servers with automated VM deployment of all services... If the same execs are there they can pat themselves on the back for only taking that long to learn how to sell cloud systems...
Illiterate (Score:1)
This is the second slashdot article today where the quoted original piece is illiterate.
"Enteprise" is not a word.
This is not a slashdot problem, and it's not [so-called] AI. This is FUCKY SLOPPY AS SHIT WRITING. I guess I'm tilting at windmills here but if you're going to QUOTE ILLITERATE CRAP please do place a [sic] on it so we know YOU didn't do it.
Don Quixote. No, not "Dawn Coyote."
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