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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

103 points by darthcloud

by jjice

4 subcomments

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.
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.

by andrewl-hn

5 subcomments

This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight. 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?
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!

by dcre

0 subcomment

Source code here :)
https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer

by bradfa

1 subcomments

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?

by bradfa

0 subcomment

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.

by kevinrineer

0 subcomment

I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.

by girfan

0 subcomment

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?

by dralley

0 subcomment

It's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.

by Kostic

0 subcomment

A very beautiful website and a machine. Oxide folks should be proud, you can see the love that went into it.

by arjie

0 subcomment

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.

by dorongrinstein

0 subcomment

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.

by PoignardAzur

1 subcomments

The screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.

by burnrate

2 subcomments

I wonder how much a rack like this costs

by joshAg

0 subcomment

may the Sun never set

by DiabloD3

0 subcomment

Thats neat.

by RobLach

0 subcomment

Neat