Startup Oxide Computer Company has launched an on-premise cloud computing rack system.
The solution has a fully unified hardware and software design which the company said enables enterprises to get the benefits of cloud computing in their own data center, without having to rent hardware from cloud computing companies.
The rack system can have 16, 24, or 32 Compute Sleds and 16-32 processors with x86 cores. The compute sled is made up of AMD Epyc 7713P processors and uses Intel Tofino 2 switches. Each "Sled" can be thought of as a system with an AMD CPU, DRAM, and storage all pooled together.
The system's DRAM is between 16 and 32 TiB, and storage can span between 465.75 TiB to 931.5 TiB. Each rack is 92.7 inches tall and 23.7 inches wide and weighs approximately 1,145 kg.
The operational software was created by Oxide, including firmware, hypervisor, and control plane.
California-based Oxide was founded by CEO Steve Tuck and CTO Bryan Cantrill who have experience from companies including Dell, Sun Microsystems, and cloud infrastructure start-up Joyent, which was acquired by Samsung in 2016.
“Cloud computing has been at the foundation of digital transformation, and yet it remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model. Every enterprise today has financial, security, latency, and reliability needs that require them to own their computing infrastructure, and the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases. We are changing that,” said Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide.
Cantrill told TechCrunch: "What we realized is that nobody, despite some folks' various claims, had actually taken that hardware and software approach, that integrated rack-level approach, and then built a product on top of it that people could run in their own data centers. Nobody had done that. And that was the genesis of Oxide.”
In addition to the unveiling of the rack system, Oxide has completed a $44 million Series A financing round, bringing the company's total financing to $78m. The Series A round was led by Eclipse, with other participants including Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and Rally Ventures.
“Oxide addresses the most urgent needs of stakeholders in enterprise IT. They have eliminated the trade-off between cloud and on-premises so enterprises can achieve cloud performance across every aspect of their business,” said Andy Fligel, senior managing director at Intel Capital. “Oxide makes it possible to ‘own the cloud’ instead of renting it—a concept that could shift the economics of cloud computing.”
Oxide Computer Company has been developing the rack system for four years. Its customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services firm.
