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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

#101

Post by p_l »

indrora wrote: post #71
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.

I remember the one time I had OCP hardware in data center, and how it was essentially rumoured it's better to not ask too much how it got there - not the level of "fell of a truck", but some possibility it was ex-(big tech) equipment acquired through favours, or some really insistent negotiating with Quanta till "to be sold to (big tech)" racks ended up with us

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#102

Post by wpm »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #42
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a rack mount version of the Mac Pro you can buy

That's designed for the broadcast market, where they rack mount everything in the studio environment. It's not really a server, it has no out of band management, redundant power etc. There are third party rack mounts available for the Mac Mini and Mac Studio also.

Rack mount models have LOM over MDM.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#103

Post by steveklabnik »

kev009 wrote: post #96
steveklabnik wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure. It’s not just GPUs; given that we have one product with three SKUs, there’s a variety of workloads we won’t be appropriate for just yet. Just takes time to diversify the offering.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#104

Post by 0x457 »

sophacles wrote: post #18
PreInternet01 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's an interesting take. What's your reasoning? Whats your evidence?

Pretty much everything Oxide publishes on github is either in rust or it's an sdk to service in rust. Well and web panel isn'tin rust, so negative points for that, true evangelists would have used WASM.

But Oxide reason to exist is to keep memory of cool racks from Sun running Solaris alive forever.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#105

Post by danpalmer »

steveklabnik wrote: post #92
danpalmer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we are happy to talk about customers that allow us to talk about them

This is what I meant by "don't disclose", I didn't mean that Oxide was in any way secretive, but that usually this stuff doesn't get agreed, and that it would make more sense to ask the customer rather than the company selling as Oxide won't want to disclose unless there's already an agreement in place (formal or otherwise).

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#106

Post by danpalmer »

slyall wrote: post #88
ramon156 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most companies dont disclose their customers In my head I'm imagining an average landing page. They slap their customers on there like stickers. I doubt bluesky would stay secretive about using oxide if they did

Those customers listed on the front page of companies are there as part of an agreement. Usually something like a discount. Certainly they are not listed without permission. 10x that if it is a case study.

I think they often are listed without permission unfortunately, and often literally based on on the the email addresses of people signing up for a trial. I see my company's logo on the landing page of many products that we don't use or may even have a policy preventing our use of.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#107

Post by steveklabnik »

danpalmer wrote: post #105
steveklabnik wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we are happy to talk about customers that allow us to talk about them This is what I meant by "don't disclose", I didn't mean that Oxide was in any way secretive, but that usually this stuff doesn't get agreed, and that it would make more sense to ask the customer rather than the company selling as Oxide won't want to disclose unless there's already an agreement in place (formal or otherwise).

Gotcha. That totally makes sense, I would t have thought about it that way.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#108

Post by KenoFischer »

I really love Oxide to an unhealthy amount (it's become a bit of a meme among my colleagues), but sometimes I do wonder whether they went about their go-to-market the right way. They really tried to do everything at once - custom servers, custom router, custom rack, everything. Their accomplishments are technologically impressive, but, as somebody who is in a position to make purchasing decisions, not economically attractive. They're 3x more expensive than our existing hardware, two generations behind (I'm aware they're on track for a refresh) and don't have any GPUs. E.g. what I would have loved to see is just an after-market BMC/NIC/firmware solution using their stack. Plug it into a cheap Gigabyte system (their BMC is pluggable and NIC is OCP) and just have the control plane manage it as a whole box. I'd have easily paid serveral thousand $ per server just for that. All the rack scale integration, virtualization, migration, network storage, etc stuff is cool, but not everyone needs it. Get your foot in the door at customers, build up some volume for better deals with AMD, and then start building the custom rack stuff ... Of course it's easy to be a critic from the side lines. As I said, I do really love what the Oxide folks are doing, I just really hope it'll become possible for me to buy their gear at some point.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#109

Post by preisschild »

KenoFischer wrote: post #108

I really love Oxide to an unhealthy amount (it's become a bit of a meme among my colleagues), but sometimes I do wonder whether they went about their go-to-market the right way. They really tried to do everything at once - custom servers, custom router, custom rack, everything. Their accomplishments are technologically impressive, but, as somebody who is in a position to make purchasing decisions, not economically at…

Id also wish I could get to play around with a cheaper version of their tech, but they probably havw enough customers that really want a large-scale solution that is completely customizable

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#110

Post by leoc »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #32
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…

OCP hardware is only really accessible to hyperscalers. You can't go out and just buy a rack or two, the Taiwanese OEMs don't do direct deals that small. Even if they did, no integration is done for you. You would have to integrate the compute hardware from one company, the network fabric from another company, and then the OS and everything else from yet another. That's a lot of risk, a lot of engineering resources,…

But isn’t it a little surprising (I’m not an expert) that Dell or Supermicro or somefirm like that hadn’t already started offering an approachable access to either OCP gear or a proprietary knockoff of it? Presumably that may still happen if Oxide is seen to have proven the market.
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