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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

#111

Post by yencabulator »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #33
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 answer to "who does X" is Oxide. That's the point. You're not going to Dell who's integrating multiple vendors in the same box in a way that "should" work. You're getting a rack where everything is designed to work together from top to bottom. The goal is that you can email Oxide and they'll be able fix it regardless of where it is in the stack, even down to the processor ROM.

And a big enough customer will evaluate Oxide's resources and consider for themselves whether they think Oxide can provide a quick enough turnaround for everything. That's what GP is talking about.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#112

Post by AceJohnny2 »

INTPenis wrote: post #84
arpinum wrote: post #78

How long before a VPS pops up running Oxide racks? Or, why wouldn't a VPS build on top of Oxide if they offer better efficiency and server management?

Because they use such esoteric software that you'll forever be reliant on Oxide. I'd rather they use more standardized open source software like Linux, Talos, k8s, Ceph, KubeVirt. Instead of rolling it all themselves on an OS that has a very small niche ecosystem.

Oxide is providing an x86 platform to run VMs/containers on. That's a commoditized market.

The value they're offering is that the rack-level consumption and management is improved over the competition, but you should be able to run whatever you want on the actual compute, k8s or whatnot.

This also means you'd not be forever reliant on Oxide.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#113

Post by AceJohnny2 »

mkeeter wrote: post #76
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

> Also prices don't make sense for us.

Oof.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#114

Post by wbl »

paddy_m wrote: post #97
malfist wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At 48 volts arcing shorts aren't the concern.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#116

Post by intelVISA »

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…

Oxide are doing great work. Hoping they can probe the market a bit more for us out on the sidelines preparing to drop in and compete with some similar tech.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#117

Post by cdchn »

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…

I'm curious what their burn rate is.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#118

Post by jauntywundrkind »

favorited wrote: post #80
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is such a narrow narrow tiny corner of computing needs. That has such serious need for ownership, no matter the cost. And has extremely fantastically chill as shit overall computing needs, is un-perfomamce-sensitive as it gets.

I could not be less convinced by this information that this is a useful indicator for the other 99.999999999% of computing needs.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#119

Post by hn-throw »

mycoliza wrote: post #86
hn-throw wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL/DR, isnt there a single, shared, DC supply that supplies said piece of copper? Presumably connected to mains? Or are the running on SOFCs?

The big piece of copper is fed by redundant rectifiers. Each power shelf has six independent rectifiers which are 5+1 redundant if the rack is fully loaded with compute sleds, or 3+3 redundant if the rack is half-populated. Customers who want more redundancy can also have a second power shelf with six more rectifiers.

I'm going to assume this is on 3 phase power, but how is the ripple filtered?

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#120

Post by cdchn »

throw0101d wrote: post #70
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. What would you classify Shopify as? > One existing Oxide user is e-commerce giant Shopify, which indicates the growth potential for the systems available. * https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-clou... Their CEO has tweeted about it: * https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669 > Who writes the security mitigations for speculati…

How much did Shopify buy? Sounds like from what the CEO is saying they bought 1 unit.

>We learned that Oxide has so far shipped “under 20 racks,” which illustrates the selective markets its powerful systems are aimed at.

>B&F understands most of those systems were deployed as single units at customer sites. Therefore, Oxide hopes these and new customers will scale up their operations in response to positive outcomes.

Yikes. If they sold 20 racks in July, how many are they up to now?

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