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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

#151

Post by PeterCorless »

bcantrill wrote: post #131
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…

First, thanks for the love -- it's deeply appreciated! Our go-to-market is not an accident: we spent a ton of time (too much time?) looking at how every company had endeavored (and failed) in this space, and then considering a bunch of other options besides. Plugging into a "cheap Gigabyte" system wouldn't actually allow us to build what we've built, and we know this viscerally: before we had our system built, we had…

So my question: any Arm-based system or GPU-based system on the horizon?

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#152

Post by hinkley »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

I really wish Oxide had homelab/prosumer grade stuff. I'd be sending them so much money.

I kinda feel we need minicomputers back in this age of computing. Instead of making one giant rack that doesn’t fit through doorways, they should make a 4 ft tall unit that stacks. At least once they’re established enough that they can manage doing small installs instead of full data centers. I’ve looked around and there are tiny forklifts they could use to install 2 at once.

Just the power demands for their full rack exceed capacity for most office spaces.

That and someone needs to make a rack that has a port to plug a glycol line directly into. Doesn’t have to be Oxide, but someone should.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#153

Post by hinkley »

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?

The first large scale app I did we got offices in a building that used to have telco equipment in it. There wasn’t enough power or cooling to run about a rack worth of equipment split across several. It basically had a mini-split for AC. We had to bring in new wiring and run a glycol line to a condenser on the roof, and the smallest unit we were willing to pay for was too big so we had to knock out a wall to tack a reasonable sized office onto the end to get the volume large enough. So much wasted space for the amount of equipment in there.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#155

Post by hinkley »

bayindirh wrote: post #8
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.

Oxide is not touching DLC systems in their post even with a 100ft barge pole. Lenovo's DLC systems use 45 degrees C water to directly cool the power supplies and the servers themselves (water goes through them) for > 97% heat transfer to water. In cooler climates, you can just pump this to your drycoolers, and in winter you can freecool them with just air convection. Yes, the TDP doesn't go down, but cooling costs an…

The in case PSUs I’ve seen them gesturing to in videos don’t even seem to have cooling fins on them.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#156

Post by steveklabnik »

TabTwo wrote: post #149
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

I really wish Oxide had homelab/prosumer grade stuff. I'd be sending them so much money.

Isn't most of their stuff open source?

It is, but if you're running on different hardware than us, you'd have to do a bunch of porting. Buying a solution would be a lot simpler, as we'd have already done the porting.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#157

Post by growse »

glitchcrab wrote: post #129
thfuran wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This works brilliantly, right up to the point where your A side fails, and every single server suddenly doubles their demand on B.

Better have good capacity management so you don't go over 100% on B when that happens! (I've seen it happen and take a DC out).

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#159

Post by Sylamore »

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…

HP BladeSystem p-series chassis were all DC bus bar powered back in the mid 2000s. You had a power enclosure which provided DC output to one or more chassis in a rack over the bus bar. We were glad to be rid of those blades but it wasn't because of their power configuration.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#160

Post by [deleted] »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #112
INTPenis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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