I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm pretty sure I'm not talented enough for Oxide, but just asking myself the application questions has been a fun exercise. I'm not in love with their problem/product, but I am really into the way they work and do business.<p>Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar vibe/ethos one day.<p>Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite / well capitalised of companies.
Oxide is literally the only company where I have found zero reasons why I would be unhappy to work there. I have listened to many, many podcasts, read RFDs… it always seems like a place I would thrive. To that end, I have applied twice in the last few years; unfortunately declined both times, but to be fair, the first time I didn’t know any Rust, and the second time, I was learning it.<p>I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.
Oxide certainly sounds cool. It reminds me of when I dealt with DEC gear back in the late 90s. That stuff felt more like "real computers" than any of the IBM PC-derived drek I'd worked with. Things were actually made to work together. Configurations were tested. Firmware was made for the integrated system and the system behaved like it was meant to work together instead of being the manifest behavior of all the edge cases of all the off-the-shelf disparate components plugged-together to make the resultant machine.<p>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.<p>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.
There are two companies that I <i>want</i> want to work for. Oxide is one of them. Many places I'm still willing to work for, but in a more neutral way. They're just mostly not hiring for my role/location as far as I can tell, so it is what it is.
Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees.<p>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.<p>Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.
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)?<p>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.
<i>Baby got backplane</i>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho&t=80" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho&t=80</a>
> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted.<p>> That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?<p>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.<p>But even beyond that, your response doesn't align with your own careers page's "Hiring Process":<p>> 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.<p>Which would be in alignment:<p>> Decency<p>> We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.<p>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 <i>very directions</i> you tell candidates to read.<p>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."<p>Source: <a href="https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003" rel="nofollow">https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003</a>
> 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.<p>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.
The particular 'mess' I've encountered was I applied (wrote 11 pages of interview material) on 2024/09/29 and then received a canned 'yeah whoops sorry for taking this long, not interested' on 2025/03/24. That's almost 6 months of delay from submission to first contact.<p>Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock?<p>And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.)<p>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])<p>[0] <a href="https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002" rel="nofollow">https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002</a>
Risk going down over time is another way of saying strike price and value has gone up- which is another way of saying, some employees are gaining in equity value more favorably than others.<p>What risk, exactly, did you take on? Did you personally loan the company money?<p>But in any case - equity is part of compensation, and your company claimed everyone deserves equal compensation.<p>It wasn’t earnest, you’re right, but only because I knew how you’d respond. The intention was to point out the obvious inconsistencies in your “values.”
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Hey man,<p>You’re not getting across a reasonable point here. Maybe take a step back and think about what you really want to say.<p>Clearly something is landing wrong, but exactly what is not being well communicated.
Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before).<p>How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?<p>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 <i>definitely</i> 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.<p>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).
There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice.<p>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.
“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing.<p>DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take <i>a week</i>, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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 <i>told</i> that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen.<p>The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me.<p>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.
Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.<p>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.
Hundreds of <i>good</i> applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.<p>You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.<p>You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.
As long as you aren’t biasing for any protected classes, why does it matter? If you as an employer have found that graduates from Foo University is a generally positive signal, then why wouldn’t you bias for that, if it’s saving you significant time, and introducing minimal false positives?
Yes, people don’t realize that’s why a lot of desirable jobs/grad schools become filled with people from top universities and previous employment. Pedigree is probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to shaving off a good chuck of applicants to a level that at least you know would be adequate.
Once again, you're misunderstanding the goal of the system if you think that it's necessary to deliberately whittle down hundreds of good applicants through careful process to get a great hire.<p>Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
Reminds me of something I heard once.<p>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash<p>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.<p>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?<p>Peak humanity.
> what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?<p>I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.<p>Like a human does.<p>> Reminds me of something I heard once.<p>>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash<p>>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.<p>I was actually about to make the same joke.
>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<p>So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?
Yeah I just got a new job and they sent me swag for getting to a certain (quite early) stage in the interview process. Awesome idea.<p>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.
Hiring is expensive linearly to the salary of the people you're trying to hire, so if any of the companies you've worked for were trying to hire well, it'd be a rounding error. Back of the envelope is 90 days of salary, minimum, is the cost to hire, so there's no reason to be miserly about it - if you can't afford it, you can't afford to hire at all.
From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.
If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring.<p>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 have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours".<p>Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
My materials probably took 4-6 hours to write the first draft (I did most of it over two evenings, maybe one more just skimming the questions to figure out what things to talk about for each question), probably 2-3 hours or so to edit, then probably another hours over an evening just skimming it too many times before I hit submit. My materials were 16 pages or so, some of that was the original document (which has been linked in this comment section).<p>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.<p>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.
The process is open, you can go to <a href="https://oxide.computer/careers" rel="nofollow">https://oxide.computer/careers</a> and look yourself. Here is the direct link to the materials: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiuYkrFHEl2o9SWydzWtwU/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiu...</a><p>I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
I don’t remember for my first application; probably a few hours. My second application was 27 pages, of which you can attribute a few to the pre-existing template. I spent probably 10-15 hours on it, spread across several evenings.
My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less.<p>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.
<a href="https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003" rel="nofollow">https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003</a>
With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me
Thought of the same, has a big Sun Microsystems vibe.
I've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :)<p>but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
Oxide is one of very few companies where I felt that it is a company I really want to work for one day. I spent a decent amount of hours answering the questions and sent in the application, but never got any feedback and this was like 2-3 years ago.
Spending time at regulated environments, I were in a similar situation that I could not really give out relevant information from the past. However, I have no regrets at all spending the time, as it was very useful for me personally to reflect over each question.
I'd be interested in the context if you'd be willing to share.<p>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.
no, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.
Sounds approachable, and something that would be evaluated based on merit.<p>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.
Seriously - looks so cool
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This design feels very <i>obvious-in-hindsight</i>. Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?<p>Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
I wish I could edit my post.<p>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 <i>could</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>really well</i>. 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.
Forgot how I learned this but IIUC, blades failed because they expended per-rack weight and power budgets for datacenters with single enclosures. It turned out that you could compress 48U worth of computers into 8U or so, as long as you do not fill back the empty space with anything, because the cooling/cabling crawlspace collapses and circuit breakers will go off if you had done so. It wasn't because they still needed cabling.<p>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.<p>(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)
Cabling, plumbing, etc, aside, all the "blade servers" I've ever worked with were still glorified IBM PC's. They still have BMC's strapped to legacy interfaces pretending to be decades-old hardware allowing for "headless" operation of a platform originally intended to be a single-user computer on a desk with a monitor and keyboard, etc.<p>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.
Speaking of the army, it's not clear that the extremely narrow feature set of Oxide justifies the engineering effort required.<p>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.
The big difference that everyone is missing in this subthread is that Oxide is about the hardware <i>and</i> the software.<p>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."<p>I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324</a>
> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this,<p>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.<p>I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
Cisco does too and theres another hardware virtualization layer below the normal ones ( so for example you can have many virtual nics per actual nic, etc)
Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.<p>Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.<p>So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.<p>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 <i>tiny</i>.<p>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.<p>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).
You're right, even though I did have a good use-case for them. Back in 2000-~2020 I built a "boutique linux hosting" provider, and the Supermicro "Twin^2" servers really fit our use case. We were mostly serving small dedicated servers and were very price sensitive.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
Aside: we were also one of the first VM providers, I see on the Wayback Machine we were offering it in Feb 2005, predating Digital Ocean by at least 6 years. I've regretted not marketing and selling that service much more widely. It was a side project and we had a lot of irons in the fire at the time, so we didn't focus on it very much.<p>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.
> 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).<p>Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.<p>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.
Blade servers have been doing this for 25+ years.
The vendors did make blades in the 2000s.
I thought surely this isn't just blade servers, that those compute shelves were full of GPUs or something novel, but no just blades reincarnated. I used to support HP's baby version of this, the c3000.
Also, a big cabinet into which you plug varying amounts of hardware capacity, then use the control plane to partition into various virtual resources, describes at least at the conceptual level IBM going back decades.
I learned about blade servers back in ~2010 because Blizzard used to run World of Warcraft realms on them and auctioned them off for charity.<p><a href="https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade" rel="nofollow">https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server</a>
> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?<p>They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
Oxide hitting stride just in time for the memory crisis. I hope they can sustain because they have the coolest stuff, and the podcast is great.<p>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.
Source code here :)<p><a href="https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer</a>
Curious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at least allows for replacing the card if it breaks/wears/etc, and mounting the front of the adapter card to a bulkhead should prevent much shifting of the card in the slot. Neat design and reuse of a cheap high speed connector.
Very instructive on how a computer rack works. I cought only later on that it was Oxide specific, but the design decisions seem so obvious to me that they look like industry standards. What about firmware architecture ? How do you design for reliability ? And how often does an infra like that stop working bc of a hardware problem ? And firmware ?
I met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.
Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0</a>
A very beautiful website and a machine. Oxide folks should be proud, you can see the love that went into it.
Oh wow, they're on the Epyc 9005 series now. Very cool. Dude, what a monster of a machine that rack is haha. Bloody hell.
How easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and without tools?
Cool tour.
I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?
It's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.
I'm sure you're aware there's a huge amount of computation that isn't matrix multiplication :)
They didn't. They actually said they have huge demand because of AI companies. Turns out, when the AI is surfing the web or using doing other task, that's a CPU. So they also have demand for CPU.
I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.
I don’t think there’s a GPU component so it’s probably a much lower power profile. Also, per this cloudflare write up the Turin gen of the AMD Epycs is very efficient: <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/</a>
Interop standards for this like Open19 are not widely deployed and without interoperability it’s a dead
end since you need the hosting provider to give you the drop to your rack or cage. Hyperscalers I don’t know, but I’d guess they don’t deploy rack density that calls for liquid cooling yet.
Not worth the capex to do that. Air cooling with evaporators up front is pretty standard and works great, not to mention fewer moving parts.
99% of data centers do not have liquid available to the rack. Liquid within the rack doesn't really help.
big fan of oxide, and love the demo overall, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that these kinds of 3D demos are a bit gimmicky/cheap nowadays. pages like this used to be a signal for a high-end product and or a benchmark for good engineering. now though, we all know that this kind of work can be vibe-coded with threejs fairly quickly if you have the assets. idk ... it feels like it's trying to capture my attention through flashing lights instead of letting the work stand on its own<p>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<p>EDIT: typos
IIRC the CAD exports were in the many millions of polygons, so there's substantial work in preparing the assets for the explorer. Kenan (the 3d artist I worked with) did fantastic work cleaning and optimising them. I'm somewhat jealous of hardware startups with products without quite so many parts!<p>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 appreciate ya commenting, and let me tell ya directly that the work is great! I'm an old-head and curmudgeon - my thoughts here are about the world at large. your work here is great, please keep it up!
My feeling? I ask myself the same question as I do for for everything nowadays. Yeah this might be ai slop, but is it good ai slop? If it's good, like this, I feel good. If it's bad, I feel bad.<p>Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
yeah, I agree with you. I guess the part that feels disingenuous is that these kinds of projects are some-what cashing in on attention from people who still who see threejs slop as "high-effort UIs." this speaks more about me than other ppl, I'm just personally already at the point where all of this feels closer to slop rather than quality. I guess as this trend plays out, we'll all eventually feel somewhat similar on the yet-another-3d-UI-slop trend
The screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.
Any console errors? Perhaps drop an issue on the repo if you have a moment: <a href="https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues</a>
That's why I prefer BSD :P
completely locked my machine up with Firefox on Linux. Gave up after that.
> Intelo Tofino 2<p>Isn't it decommissioned?
Do they have customers?
Yes. I believe the first public post about a customer was this one, in 2024: <a href="https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory" rel="nofollow">https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawre...</a>
may the Sun never set
I wonder how much a rack like this costs
IIRC I heard that a single rack is upwards of $600k–$1m, but that was before the AI boom/crisis.
I don't recall if the price was confidential, but I will say that it's higher than that, and that it has been influenced by the RAM cost increase.<p>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.
With only 288 128GiB DDR5 ECC DIMMs? I'm sure that doesn't cost much.
Thats neat.
Neat