Hey everyone, Matthew Sanabria here from Oxide Computer Company. We get asked if Oxide is a mainframe, and I wanted to address this question, especially after I heard someone describe Oxide as a mainframe for Zoomers. And the more I thought about that answer, the more I tended to agree. Oxide kind of does look like a mainframe for Zoomers.
Is Oxide a mainframe?
Let’s talk about it. And before we dive in, I wanna mention that mainframe can be a negative connotation word depending on how you’re used to it. Maybe you’re used to closed source, litigious companies. But Oxide is none of that. We’re open source. So we’re just gonna steer away from that definition of the word mainframe, and instead we’ll focus on the physical footprint and the design aspects of mainframes to show you how it relates to Oxide.
Now, if you’re a Gen X person, you probably see a mainframe in terms of its physical footprint, and that’s correct. Mainframes were defined during an era where computers were just physically larger. You had a mainframe, which was a rack of compute. You had a minicomputer, which was the size of a bookshelf, and you had other computers then.
Fast forward to today, Oxide maintains that physical form factor and it just stuffs much more dense compute into that same form factor. So you’d be correct to say like, hey, this Oxide rack looks like the mainframe of my day. And that is a perfectly valid viewpoint, but peeking behind the hood a little bit, you’ll see that Oxide has a whole distributed system inside. We have sleds running the control plane. Redundant power. Redundant networking. And that resembles sort of the mainframe’s design goals of redundant components, extensive I/O, compute virtualization, and hot swapping of parts. And Oxide has all that. So from the more Zoomer take, you see that distributed system and what it’s meant to provide and you look at Oxide and you’re like, wait, it’s providing that. Oxide is kind of the modern mainframe.
So I like both sides of this. And as a millennial, I sit in the middle of this. I can see where the Gen X can see the physical comparisons. And I can see where the Zoomers get the more distributed system comparisons. So yeah, I think I would say like Oxide tends to fit those definitions of a mainframe if you look at it from a physical and distributed systems perspective. What do you think though? I’m curious. Do you consider Oxide a mainframe? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to chat about this more. Thanks.