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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

#121

Post by unsnap_biceps »

leoc wrote: post #110
bigfatkitten wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Supermicro does sell OCP racks.

https://www.supermicro.com/solutions/Solution-Brief-Supermic...

I recall them offering older versions of the specs but can't easily find a reference, so I might be wrong about how accessible they were.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#122

Post by kjellsbells »

leoc wrote: post #110
bigfatkitten wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Azure tried this, not with their hyperscaler stuff, but with Azure Operator Nexus.

Basically an "opinionated" combination of Dell, Arista, and Pure storage with a special Azure AKS running on top and a metric ton of management and orchestration smarts. The target customer base was telcos who needed local capabilities in their data centers and who might otherwise have gone to OCP.

As far as I can surmise, it's dead, but not EOLed. Microsoft nuked the operator business unit earlier in the year, and judging by recent job postings from contract shops, AT&T might be the only customer.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#123

Post by zamadatix »

p_l wrote: post #98
zamadatix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure what you mean wrt to Apple's uniqueness. AMD/Mediatek/Intel/Qualcomm/Samsung only make margin on how well they invest on their designs vs their competitors and they'd all love to be outshipping each other and Apple in any market. All, including Apple, also rely on the same manufacturer for their top products and the ones (Intel/Samsung) with alternatives have not been able to use that as an advantage for top performing products. Sure, Apple can work directly with their own product... but at the end of the day the goal and available customer pool to fight over is the same and they still ship fewer units than the others.

I'm not hands-on familiar with other serious ARM server market players but for several years now Ampere ARM server CPUs at least are nothing like you describe. Phoronix says it best in https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-os-ampereone

> All the Linux distributions I attempted worked out effortlessly on this Supermicro AmpereOne server. Like with Ampere Altra and Ampere eMAG before that, it's a seamless AArch64 Linux experience. Thanks to supporting open standards like UEFI, Arm SBSA/SBBR and ACPI and not having to rely on DeviceTrees or other nuisances, installing an AArch64 Linux distribution on Ampere hardware is as easy as in the x86_64 space.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#124

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

murderfs wrote: post #94
PreInternet01 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master/ looks alive to me.

(And for that matter, Oracle's proprietary Solaris seems better maintained than I ever expected, though in this context I think the open source fork is the relevant thing to look at.)

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#125

Post by chambers »

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 kinda feel that their focus is more on building a great technology (& culture?) than a great business.

Not necessarily a bad choice; after all, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#126

Post by applied_heat »

walrus01 wrote: post #24
zcw100 wrote: post #22

I believe the telco’s did dc power for years so I don’t think this anything new. Any old hands out there want to school us on how it was done in the old days?

big ass rectifiers big ass solid copper busbars huge gauge copper cables going around a central office (google "telcoflex IV") big DC breaker/fuse panels specialized dc fuse panels for power distribution at the top of racks, using little tiny fuses 100% overhead steel ladder rack type cable trays, since your typical telco CO was never a raised floor type environment (UNLIKE legacy 1960s/1970s mainframe computer rooms…

Can you give me a link to this 1.3 gbps radio product? I have some Alcatel radios with waveguides on a licensed band that only do 50 megabit that I would upgrade if there was something that could get more bits out of the same bandwidth and towers.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#127

Post by applied_heat »

hn-throw wrote: post #119
mycoliza wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Inductors and capacitors usually

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#128

Post by favorited »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #118
favorited wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Good, because you can’t have one.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#129

Post by glitchcrab »

thfuran wrote: post #68
glitchcrab wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But 2 PSUs plugged into the same AC supply still have a single point of failure.

Which is why you have two separate PDUs in the rack which are fed by different power feeds and you connect the server's 2 PSUs to opposing PDUs.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#130

Post by bcantrill »

chambers wrote: post #125
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 kinda feel that their focus is more on building a great technology (& culture?) than a great business. Not necessarily a bad choice; after all, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

We are definitely very much building a business! We have the iconoclastic belief that you can build a business by having a terrific team building a great product that customers love. And we're getting there![0]

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/18/llnl_oxide_compute/

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