Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
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.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.
So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.
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 tiny.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.
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.
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 could 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.
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.
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 really well. 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.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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."
I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
