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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

#91

Post by outworlder »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #11
rincebrain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they'd admit much about it even if they had one internally, both because Apple isn't known for their openness about many things, and because they already exited the dedicated server hardware business years ago, so I think they're likely averse to re-entering it without very strong evidence that it would be beneficial for more than a brief period. In particular, while I'd enjoy such a device, Apple's who…

I will add that consumer macOS is a piss-poor server OS. At one point, for many years, it would just sometimes fail to `exec()` a process. This would manifest as a random failure on our build farm about once/twice a month. (This would manifest as "/bin/sh: fail to exec binary file" because the error type from the kernel would have the libc fall back to trying to run the binary as a script, as normal for a Unix, but i…

> I will add that consumer macOS is a piss-poor server OS.

Windows is also abysmal but it hasn't stopped people from using it.

But yes, it is too much of a desktop OS.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#92

Post by steveklabnik »

danpalmer wrote: post #61
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.

Not Oxide or Bluesky, but firstly I'd suggest that asking the company about their customers is unlikely to get a response, most companies don't disclose their customers. Secondly, Bluesky have been growing quickly, I can only assume their hardware is too, and that means long lead time products like an Oxide rack aren't going to work, especially when you can have an off the shelf machine from Dell delivered in a few d…

Oxide is very open, we are happy to talk about customers that allow us to talk about them. Some don’t want to, others are very happy to be mentioned, just like any other company.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#93

Post by steveklabnik »

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?

> Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company.

Our early customers include government, finance, and places like Shopify.

You’re not wrong that some places may prefer older companies but that doesn’t mean they all do.

Illumos is not really directly relevant to the customer, it’s a non user facing implementation detail.

We provide security updates.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#94

Post by murderfs »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #12
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that... I didn't see any mention of Rust in the article?

[flagged]

The raison d'être of Oxide isn't Rust, it's continuing to pretend that the bloated corpse of Solaris still has some signs of life.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#95

Post by steveklabnik »

kev009 wrote: post #75

Where is the GPU?

We don’t currently have GPUs in the product. The closed-ness of the GPU space is a bit of a cultural difference, but we’ll surely have something eventually. As a small company, we have to focus on our strengths, and there’s plenty of folks who don’t need GPUs right now.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#96

Post by kev009 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #95
kev009 wrote: post #75

Where is the GPU?

We don’t currently have GPUs in the product. The closed-ness of the GPU space is a bit of a cultural difference, but we’ll surely have something eventually. As a small company, we have to focus on our strengths, and there’s plenty of folks who don’t need GPUs right now.

That's fine, just awkward because the GS report shows the TAM or problem depending on your perspective being accelerated computing.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#97

Post by paddy_m »

malfist wrote: post #83
shivak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DC circuit protection is absolutely not harder than AC. DC has the advantage in current flowing in only one direction, not two

Which makes it much harder to break the circuit vs AC

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#98

Post by p_l »

zamadatix wrote: post #57
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 sur…

It's more a case of selection of optimization parameters and corresponding economy. It's not so much that apple towers over others in design (though they are absolutely no slouches and have wins there) but their design team is in position to coordinate with product directly and as such isn't as limited by "but will it sell in high enough numbers for the excel sheet at investor's desk?"

The real show stopper for years is that ARM servers are just not prepared to be a proper platform. uBoot with grudgingly included FDT (after getting kicked out of Linux kernel) does not make a proper platform, and often there's also no BMC, unique approaches to various parts making the server that one annoying weirdo in the data center, etc.

Cloud providers can spend the effort to backfill necessary features with custom parts, but doing so on your own on-prem is hard

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#99

Post by steveklabnik »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #23
PreInternet01 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They wrote their own BMC and various other bits and pieces in Rust. That's an extremely tiny part of the whole picture.

It’s significantly more than that, but it’s also true that we include stuff in other languages where appropriate. CockroachDB is in Go, and illumos is in C, as two examples. But almost all new code we write is in Rust. That is the stuff you’re talking about, but also like, our control plane.

Oh and we write a lot of Typescript too.

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