FAQ Friday

And the answer is that the Oxide rack is designed for operability. Now, sometimes we in IT I think are a little bit pejorative about the way we think about how something is operated and the ease of use, and we think we should put a GUI on top of something to make it operable.

We should, in the words of a former colleague of mine, "Give people the clicky-clicky."

And the clicky-clicky can be helpful, that’s nice. But if you’re putting the clicky-clicky on top of something that is fundamentally mis-architected, you’re not actually solving the problem. And in fact, you’re papering over real complexity, and it requires real skill to actually understand that system when it misbehaves.

The Oxide rack is designed and architected for operability. Yes, we have the gorgeous clicky-clicky with that great Oxide green, but at a much deeper level, we have the foundation for operability.

What does that actually mean? Well, you’ve heard us talk before about how we have no BIOS in the Oxide system. If we have no BIOS, it means we have no BIOS updates.

Does that mean we don’t have firmware in the system? No, of course we’ve got firmware, but we deliver it as part of the Oxide rack. When you update the Oxide rack, it updates all of that firmware for you. It’s part of the operator experience is just having that update "go."

From the hardware perspective, we’ve got an Oxide sled here. We blind mate into not just power, but networking. What does that mean? That means that all the cabling is in the backplane. There’s no cabling for the operator to screw up. Because it is really easy to screw up things like cabling. It’s really easy have a BIOS update get screwed up for you.

I mean, when you’ve done a BIOS update, it always gives you this very terrifying language, "Do not power off the machine. Do not look away." So as an operator, you’re always holding your breath when you’re changing cabling, when you’re updating firmware, let alone updating the software stack on top of it.

With Oxide, we do all of that for you. We’ve architected that as a unified system with fully integrated hardware and software. As a result, you can operate the Oxide rack if you have experience operating IT anywhere in the cloud, on-prem, you can operate the Oxide rack. It’s designed for you to be able to operate it easily and without a lot of time, so you can go off and do the other things you need to go do, deliver terrific infrastructure to your customers.

Thanks.