[andrewl-hn]

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!

[andrewl-hn]

I wish I could edit my post.

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.

[bri3d]

> 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.

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.

[steveklabnik]

The big difference that everyone is missing in this subthread is that Oxide is about the hardware and the software.

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

[baby_souffle]

> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this,

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

[Melatonic]

Cisco does too and theres another hardware virtualization layer below the normal ones ( so for example you can have many virtual nics per actual nic, etc)

[casumel]

Cisco UCS! A great hardware platform, albeit quite expensive.

[XorNot]

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.

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).

[foobiekr]

Blade servers have been doing this for 25+ years.

[wmf]

The vendors did make blades in the 2000s.

[creaturemachine]

I thought surely this isn't just blade servers, that those compute shelves were full of GPUs or something novel, but no just blades reincarnated. I used to support HP's baby version of this, the c3000.

[jeffbee]

Also, a big cabinet into which you plug varying amounts of hardware capacity, then use the control plane to partition into various virtual resources, describes at least at the conceptual level IBM going back decades.

[manwithopinions]

I learned about blade servers back in ~2010 because Blizzard used to run World of Warcraft realms on them and auctioned them off for charity.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server

[fred_is_fred]

> 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?

They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.