Rackscale system can be had with up to 2,048 cores, 32TB of RAM, and nearly a petabyte of flash
The 3,000 pound system stands nine feet tall , draws 15kW under load, and connects up to 32 compute nodes and 12.8Tbps of switching capacity using an entirely custom software stack.
As you might expect, actually doing that isn't as simple as it might sound. According to CTO Bryan Cantrill, achieving this goal meant building most of the hardware and software stack from scratch.In terms of form factor, this had a couple of advantages as Cantrill says Oxide was able to integrate several hyperscale niceties, like a blind-mate backplane for direct current power delivery, which isn't the kind of thing commonly found on enterprise systems.
These resources are divided up to things like virtual machines using a custom hypervisor based on Bhyve and Illumos unix. This might seem like a strange choice over KVM or Xen, which are used extensively by cloud providers, but sticking with a unix-based hypervisor makes sense considering Cantrill's history at Sun Microsystems.
In addition to power savings, Oxide says the integration between the service processor and hypervisor allow it manage workloads proactively. For example, if one of the nodes starts throwing an error — we imagine this could be something as simple as a fan failing — it could automatically migrate any workloads running on that node to another system before it fails.
At the moment, there aren't all that many options. You've got a general-purpose compute node with onboard NVMe for storage. In the base configuration, you're looking at a half-rack system with a minimum of 16 nodes totaling 1,024 cores and 8TB of RAM — twice that for the full config.