Hardware Podcasts

Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!

Oxide and Friends · 4 Jul 2023 · 2h 02m · Episode 19

What this episode covers

Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, joined by Adam Klabnik, discuss the shipping of their first commercial rack-scale computer, explaining that the product is an on-premises cloud infrastructure solution designed to offer hyperscaler-level elasticity without the public cloud. They address skepticism about the business model by highlighting the growing need for data sovereignty, latency reduction, and cost efficiency for large enterprises, arguing that owning infrastructure makes economic sense at scale. The founders detail the technical necessity of building custom hardware and firmware together to solve power efficiency, cooling, and support issues inherent in commodity server stacks, while also defending their choice of Illumos and their decision to build a robust, open-source hypervisor rather than relying on VMware or Firecracker.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide, AMD, NVIDIA, VMware, Joyent, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Benchmark Electronics, MotivAir, Silicon Valley Bank
Products
Firecracker, SmartOS, AS/400
Tools
DTrace
Also
Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck, Adam Klabnik, Illumos, ZFS

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