Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour (opens in new tab)

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.

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!

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.

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 :)

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

EDIT: typos

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

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

Do they have customers?

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

may the Sun never set

I wonder how much a rack like this costs

Thats neat.

Neat