Post AXG8wiVVeeWWrTvb04 by kevinbowrin@ottawa.place
 (DIR) More posts by kevinbowrin@ottawa.place
 (DIR) Post #AXG8wiVVeeWWrTvb04 by kevinbowrin@ottawa.place
       2023-07-01T14:14:08Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       From the prospective of higher-ed IT, @oxidecomputer is very exciting. It solves so many of my problems all at once.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXG969YETXIZLKhWxk by adr@mastodon.social
       2023-07-01T15:54:06Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kevinbowrin @oxidecomputer ...I don't know much about them, other than a guy I really respect works there. what do you see as being especially good?
       
 (DIR) Post #AXG96AkK24Yz37MhRg by kevinbowrin@ottawa.place
       2023-07-01T16:54:55Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @adr @oxidecomputer So let's say you're running a small-ish IT dept at a university. You have some aging Dell (maybe even Sun/Oracle) hardware that needs a refresh. And you probably need a new SAN, maybe a new switch, your existing Hypervisor software has reached end-of-life...You look at moving to the cloud, but the monthly costs are very high, you're worried about vendor lock in, and the systems you need to talk to are all on-campus. Most likely you have cap ex funding (one-time, big money) but very little on-going funding. You'll probably buy some on-prem hardware instead. You have a lot of decisions you have to make about capacity, compatibility, reliability... You know you need to handle a really wide range of services. Some of those are commodity software like Drupal or Jira, with relatively good security stories. Some are research or community projects with no commercial support and a less than rosy security story. That's exactly the kind of thing VMs are good at. Maybe you want containers on top of that, but you probably want VMs underneath anyway. You need a new hypervisor, and you need fail-over, live migration, snapshots, backups, cloning. Do you go with VMware, which is a pretty expensive monthly fee, Proxmox, maybe OpenStack if you have the staff? Do the features you need actually work? (Looking at you, oVirt...). Now, all of a sudden, Oxide comes along. Your just buy A Big Rack. It has storage, networking, compute, and a hypervisor. You don't need to run many small RFPs and wade through marketing copy. You don't need to worry about jumbo frames or Ceph configuration or delivery timelines or competing interface fail-over standards and multiple support contracts and on and on. It works with the funding model. And the people behind it actually seem to care about the software.For overburdened, underpaid sysadmins in higher-ed, anything on the infra side that gets out of the way and let's them concentrate on their day to day problems is a huge win. If they pull off the software, they'll be a compelling alternative to Dell/VMware.