alt Hacker NewsThey’re players in a newish market segment called “hyperconverged,” basically “you buy a rack and it runs your workload, you don’t worry about individual systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it.”
Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.
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I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I thought had been the evolution of things.
Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.
Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those are found in most engineering companies as far as I know (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians companies can).
Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters. And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
So a bit like SeaMicro in the 00's but with more software?
Microsoft and Nutanix have had a hyperconverged architecture for over a decade. Oxide is mostly an alternative to Nutanix or other soup-to-nuts private clouds.
Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.