Oxide is building rack-scale data center systems with co-designed hardware and software

Brian Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, said the company develops rack-scale computers whose hardware and software are designed together. Oxide was founded in 2019. Cantrill said the company was built on the belief that cloud computing should be available not only in public clouds but also in companies’ own data centers.

Cantrill connected that idea to his experience at Joyent. There, the team built a cloud on standard Dell, HP and Supermicro hardware; after Samsung acquired Joyent in 2016, rapid growth exposed problems at the hardware-software interface. Cantrill said major cloud companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook had built their own rack-scale systems with co-designed components, while other businesses could not buy comparable infrastructure for their data centers.

According to Cantrill, Oxide raised $20 million in its seed round—an amount needed to hire a team and tackle a technically challenging project. He credited Eclipse and investor Seth as early believers in hardware-software co-design. He listed a custom compute sled, a switch and software spanning low-level firmware, the control plane and distributed storage systems among the company’s work. He also said the company completed its first instruction on x86 and eliminated dependence on UEFI. Cantrill described Oxide as “nine startups in one” and said the technical risk was high.