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How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

oxide.computer

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Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#51

Post by sunshowers »

shivak wrote: post #17

> > The power shelf distributes DC power up and down the rack via a bus bar. This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodat…

Look very carefully at the picture of the rack at https://oxide.computer/ :) there are two power shelves in the middle, not one.

We're absolutely aware of the tradeoffs here and have made quite considered decisions!

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#53

Post by sunshowers »

farawayea wrote: post #26

Their tech may be more than adequate today. Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company. They expect a lot more. Illumos is a less popular OS. It wouldn't be the first choice for the OS I'd rely on. Who writes the security mitigations for speculative execution bugs? Who patches CVEs in the shipped software which doesn't use Rust?

The illumos bare-metal OS is not directly visible to customers.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#54

Post by philipov »

hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #49
zamalek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's normally incredibly difficult for employees to disrupt at massive companies that would be the type which runs a data center. Disruption usually enters the corp in a sales deck, much like the one Oxide would have. It's stupid, but that's why we all have jobs.

I think engineers should be more forceful to lead their own visions instead being led by accountants and lawyers. After engineers have the power of implementation and de-implementstion. They need to step into dirty politics and bend other people's views. It's either theirs or ours. Win-win is a fallacy.

Let me know how that works out for you!

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#56

Post by [deleted] »

lillecarl wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If you want on prem cloud infra without having to roll it yourself, Oxide is the solution. (no affiliation, just a fan)

If you want on prem infra in exactly the shape and form Oxide delivers* I've read and understood from Joyent and SmartOS that they believe fault tolerant block devices / filesystems is the wrong abstraction, your software should handle losing storage.

[deleted]

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#57

Post by zamadatix »

einpoklum wrote: post #30

> How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions? Stop running so much useless stuff. Also maybe ARM over x86_64 and similar power-efficiency-oriented hardware. Rack-level system design, or at least power & cooling design, is certainly also a reasonable thing to do. But standardization is probably important here, rather than some bespoke solution which only one provider/supplier off…

Current ARM servers actually generally offer "on par" (varies by workload) perf/Watt for generally worse absolute performance (varies by workload) i.e. require more other overhead to achieve the same total perf despite "on par" perf/Watt.

Need either Apple to get into the general market server business or someone to start designing CPUs as well as Apple (based on the comparison between different ARM cores I'm not sure it really matters if they do so using a specific architecture or not).

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#58

Post by gruez »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #36
shivak wrote: post #17

> > The power shelf distributes DC power up and down the rack via a bus bar. This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodat…

This isn't even remotely close. Unless all 32 servers have redundant AC power feeds present, you've traded one single point of failure for another single point of failure. In the event that all 32 servers had redundant AC power feeds, you could just install a pair of redundant DC power feeds.

>Unless all 32 servers have redundant AC power feeds present, you've traded one single point of failure for another single point of failure.

Is this not standard? I vaguely remember that rack severs typically have two PSUs for this reason.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#59

Post by shivak »

dralley wrote: post #34
shivak wrote: post #17

> > The power shelf distributes DC power up and down the rack via a bus bar. This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodat…

>This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. I'll happily take a single high qualify power supply (which may have internal redundancy FWIW) over 70 much more cheaply made power supplies that stress other parts of my datacenter via sheer inefficiency, and also costs more in aggreg…

A DC busbar can propagate a short circuit across the rack, and DC circuit protection is harder than AC. So of course each server now needs its own current limiter, or a cheap fuse.

But I’m not debating the merits of this engineering tradeoff - which seems fine, and pretty widely adopted - just its advertisement. The healthcare industry understands the importance of assessing clinical endpoints (like mortality) rather than surrogate measures (like lab results). Whenever we replace “legacy” with “cloud”, it’d be nice to estimate the change in TCO.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#60

Post by glitchcrab »

gruez wrote: post #58
sidewndr46 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even remotely close. Unless all 32 servers have redundant AC power feeds present, you've traded one single point of failure for another single point of failure. In the event that all 32 servers had redundant AC power feeds, you could just install a pair of redundant DC power feeds.

>Unless all 32 servers have redundant AC power feeds present, you've traded one single point of failure for another single point of failure. Is this not standard? I vaguely remember that rack severs typically have two PSUs for this reason.

It's highly dependent on the individual server model and quite often how you spec it too. Most 1U Dell machines I worked with in the past only had a single slot for a PSU, whereas the beefier 2U (and above) machines generally came with 2 PSUs.
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