Is this a big deal? I clicked on this skeptically, but...it actually seems like kind of a big deal? It is at least technically impressive, since it seems like they're eliminated a ton of datacenter pain points with the mechanical design.
Oxide is a bit of a darling child on HN - I think a lot of people (myself included) find it interesting that they are trying to re-engineer something somewhat commoditized and boring (servers) into something cool
It sort of reminds me of a Dell blade chassis that I pulled out of a DC last year - it was pretty impressive tech that I hadn't dealt with. 6 power supplies that I think could take 110v or 220v, but you needed 220v for full capacity. All of them were hot-swappable and as long as you had 3 powered it would keep running. The compute sleds were modular and it also had integrated networking as mentioned in this article. All obviously crafted to a very high standard; even the plastic fan cages felt premium (and I'm told it cost accordingly back in 2010 or so).
Also a former employer who was a bit below the hyperscaler level also had what they called "roll-in racks", though I believe they were just taking standard servers and networking gear and integrating them somewhere (presumably with cheap labor) and then bringing them into the DC as needed.
So I don't think it's a particularly new concept, but I agree it looks like it has some potential as a product.
It seems like they have managed to fit 32 1P servers in a 42U rack. That's pretty impressive, I have to admit. I don't think I've seen that level of density before.
32 1P servers in a 42U rack is impressive? If you use 1U servers, they would only use up 32 units, leaving with 10 units for storage and networking.
Also, I remember for example HP BladeCenter BL20p systems. There you would have up to 8 or 16 servers per 6 rack units IIRC. So about 56 to 112 servers in 42U.
