[EvanAnderson]

Cabling, plumbing, etc, aside, all the "blade servers" I've ever worked with were still glorified IBM PC's. They still have BMC's strapped to legacy interfaces pretending to be decades-old hardware allowing for "headless" operation of a platform originally intended to be a single-user computer on a desk with a monitor and keyboard, etc.

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.

[wmf]

FWIW the original IBM BladeCenter platform was developed before BMCs so it had a much smaller service processor per blade connected over an out of band RS-485 management bus to a chassis management module. It was closer to Oxide than what's being sold today. And then "Windows needs VGA" kicked in.

[EvanAnderson]

IBM gear, aside from Thinkpads and the EduQuest PCs, have never been a thing I've gotten to interact with. Their documentation was always very good (which I think implies a certain level of overall competence) Given their massive legacy in datacenters I can imagine their PC-based server gear probably benefited.