[EvanAnderson]

On prem. Reliable and inexpensive network connectivity they has any resemblance to a 10G LAN doesn't exist where I am.

I work with some businesses who need very, very reliable, high-bandwidth, and low latency connectivity to their data. The amortized cost of on-prem beats the cost of any off-prem offering as soon as the cost of the necessary connectivity is factoted-in.

[electroly]

AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.

[linklocaladdr]

I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.

[electroly]

You can use EBS Local Snapshots, can't you? It stores in your Outpost S3 storage.

[MichaelZuo]

Isn't that exactly what this Oxide rack is for?

Your not going to find any serious hardware product with reliability guarantees, in writing, for much less than half a million anyways.

[EvanAnderson]

I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.

[bobthecowboy]

I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time.

That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.

[grappler]

This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?

[bobthecowboy]

If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with.

A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc.

So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there.

It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated.

Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.

[grappler]

I'm really thinking mostly about the hardware part here, and maybe just enough layers of the stack to feel like an integrated hardware setup. Let the nerds play with whatever software they want above that.

To go ahead and dream a bit:

I'd hope for an online configurator like the one SoftIron's HyperCloud has [1] but instead of "talk to a sales rep", show a price for what you just configured, like you're configuring a macbook.

Relatedly, there should be a standard rack form factor in the size category of NUCs and Mac Minis, rather than having to go all the way to the 19 inch monster racks that medium to large businesses use. If it were nailed down to the point of being able to blind mate (just learned that term from Oxide's article here!) gear into it, that would be kind of perfect.

  1. https://softiron.com/hypercloud/configure/