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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

#161

Post by Gormo »

steveklabnik wrote: post #156
TabTwo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you thought of building an affordable small-scale product for home labs and maybe SMBs? Even if that line didn't turn a profit, it could function as a loss leader in getting engineers and consultants familiar with Oxide, and an opportunity to experiment with (and ultimately evangelize) your tech stack without needing to already have an enterprise-scale use case.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#162

Post by tptacek »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #113
mkeeter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is that "oof"? They're using commodity servers today. Oxide does not offer commodity servers.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#163

Post by toast0 »

outworlder wrote: post #91
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't run a Windows server, but at least it can manage a SYN flood, whereas MacOS doesn't have syncookies or similar (their version of pf has the syncookie keyword, but it seems like it only works for traffic that transits the host, not for traffic that is terminated by the host). Windows also has some pretty nice stuff for servers like receive side scaling (afaik, Microsoft brought that to market, or at least was very early).

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#164

Post by m463 »

KenoFischer wrote: post #135
bcantrill wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please forgive my tergiversation. I fully trust that you know your path and I know how annoying it is to be why-dont-they-just'd. As I said, I'm rooting for you.

> The meaning of TERGIVERSATION is evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement : equivocation

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#165

Post by m463 »

walrus01 wrote: post #20
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…

Things like -48VDC bus bars in the 'telco' world significantly predate the OCP, all the way back to like 1952 in the Bell system. In general, the telco world concept hasn't changed much. You have AC grid power coming from your local utility into some BIG ASS RECTIFIERS which create -48VDC (and are responsible for charging your BIG ASS BATTERY BANK to float voltage), then various DC fuses/breakers going to distributio…

I remember seeing an old telephone switching system from the 20's and I think it was 48vdc. Uncertain though.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#166

Post by ttyprintk »

m463 wrote: post #165
walrus01 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like -48VDC bus bars in the 'telco' world significantly predate the OCP, all the way back to like 1952 in the Bell system. In general, the telco world concept hasn't changed much. You have AC grid power coming from your local utility into some BIG ASS RECTIFIERS which create -48VDC (and are responsible for charging your BIG ASS BATTERY BANK to float voltage), then various DC fuses/breakers going to distributio…

I remember seeing an old telephone switching system from the 20's and I think it was 48vdc. Uncertain though.

Yeah, would have been 48 vdc for line operations, 60 and up AC for the ring.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#167

Post by steveklabnik »

Gormo wrote: post #161
steveklabnik wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you thought of building an affordable small-scale product for home labs and maybe SMBs? Even if that line didn't turn a profit, it could function as a loss leader in getting engineers and consultants familiar with Oxide, and an opportunity to experiment with (and ultimately evangelize) your tech stack without needing to already have an enterprise-scale use case.

In general, we love the love we get from homelab folks, but the issue is that the current thesis of our designs is "take advantage of the scale of building at the full-rack level."

We really can't afford to do loss leaders before we have more of a business. It's already difficult enough to build a company like this, and that's with making money off of sales. I fully agree that in general, this idea completely makes sense, but you can only really employ it once you have a business to be able to absorb those losses. Right now, building and selling the current product takes up 110% of our time.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#168

Post by sam_bristow »

rcxdude wrote: post #148
PreInternet01 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think it's hard to call it a reason. It is a tool which fits in with the philosophy of the company in terms of how to achieve it's goals, but I think it would still exist if rust didn't. I would describe the goal as making a hyperscaling system that can be sold as a product, the philosophy of how to make this is an aggressive focus on integration, openness, and quality, and that rust is a language that works well w…

It's also not really a case of "rewriting in Rust" anyway, it's more just "writing it in Rust" since most of the stuff the Oxide team has built is greenfield work.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#169

Post by AceJohnny2 »

tptacek wrote: post #162
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also prices don't make sense for us. Oof.

Why is that "oof"? They're using commodity servers today. Oxide does not offer commodity servers.

Just that it highlights the challenge that Oxide faces, that they're effectively offering a "luxury" product in a deeply commoditized space.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#170

Post by tptacek »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #169
tptacek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that "oof"? They're using commodity servers today. Oxide does not offer commodity servers.

Just that it highlights the challenge that Oxide faces, that they're effectively offering a "luxury" product in a deeply commoditized space.

That's true if you think the market is SaaS upstarts like Bluesky and maybe less true if you think of the market in terms of who buys hardware. I remember early on at Matasano working for a house account, a major US corp that isn't a household name, and being shocked 2 years in when I finally had to do something in their data center (a FCIP appliance assessment) and seeing how much they'd spent on it. Look at everyone who runs (and wishes they weren't) z/OS today, or Oracle. There's more of them than I think a lot of HN people think.
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