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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

#71

Post by indrora »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #14

> When we started Oxide, the DC bus bar stood as one of the most glaring differences between the rack-scale machines at the hyperscalers and the rack-and-stack servers that the rest of the market was stuck with. That a relatively simple piece of copper was unavailable to commercial buyers It seems that 0xide was founded in 2019 and Open Compute Project had been specifying dc bus bars for 6 years at that point. People…

You simply can't buy OCP hardware is part of the issue, not new anyway. What you're going to find is "OCP Inspired" hardware that has some overlap with the full OCP specification but is almost always meant to run on 240VAC on 19in racks because nobody wants to invest the money in something that can't be bought from CDW.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#72

Post by TZubiri »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #14

> When we started Oxide, the DC bus bar stood as one of the most glaring differences between the rack-scale machines at the hyperscalers and the rack-and-stack servers that the rest of the market was stuck with. That a relatively simple piece of copper was unavailable to commercial buyers It seems that 0xide was founded in 2019 and Open Compute Project had been specifying dc bus bars for 6 years at that point. People…

One is the specs and the other is an actual implementation, what am I missing?

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#73

Post by tptacek »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #52

If any Oxide staff are here, I'm just curious, is BlueSky a customer? Seems like it would fit well with their on-prem setup.

events.bsky appears to be hosted on OVH. Single-product SAAS companies less than a few years old are unlikely to be a major customer cohort for Oxide.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#74

Post by mycoliza »

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?

We write the security mitigations. We patch the CVEs. Oxide employs many, perhaps most, of the currently active illumos maintainers --- although I don't work on the illumos kernel personally, I talk to those folks every day.

A big part of what we're offering our customers is the promise that there's one vendor who's responsible for everything in the rack. We want to be the responsible party for all the software we ship, whether it's firmware, the host operating system, the hypervisor, and everything else. Arguably, the promise that there's one vendor you can yell at for everything is a more important differentiator for us than any particular technical aspect of our hardware or software.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#76

Post by mkeeter »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #52

If any Oxide staff are here, I'm just curious, is BlueSky a customer? Seems like it would fit well with their on-prem setup.

Nope, but many of us (Oxide staff) are big fans of what Bluesky is doing!

One of the Bluesky team members posted about their requirements earlier this month, and why Oxide isn't a great fit for them at the moment:

https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3laha2upw3k2z

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#77

Post by jeffbee »

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.

Rack servers have two PSUs because enterprise buyers are gullible and will buy anything. Generally what happens in case of a single PSU failure is the other PSU also fails or it asserts PROCHOT which means instead of a clean hard down server you have a slow server derping along at 400MHz which is worse in every possible way.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#79

Post by jeffbee »

walrus01 wrote: post #19
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…

The whole thing with eliminating 70 discrete 1U server size AC-to-DC power supplies is nothing new. It's the same general concept as the power distribution unit in the center of an open compute platform rack design from 10+ years ago. Everyone who's doing serious datacenter stuff at scale knows that one of the absolute least efficient, labor intensive and cabling intensive/annoying ways of powering stuff is to have s…

PDUs are also very failure-prone and not worth the trouble.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#80

Post by favorited »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #4
grecy wrote: post #2

I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.

For who? How would this help their core mission? Maybe it becomes a big enough profit center to matter. Maybe. At the risk of taking focus away, splitting attention from the mission they're on today: building end user systems. Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside? Maybe somewhat better compute efficiency maybe, but I think if you have big workloads the huge massive AMD Turin super-chips are going to…

> Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside?

They do build it for themselves. From their security blog:

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing."

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>

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