Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
171–180 of 185 posts
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#172Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#173> Replacing low-efficiency AC power supplies with a high-efficiency DC Bus Bar
The part after it about better cooling fans, meh, there are more efficient liquid-cooling methods including immersion-cooling which are already there in implementation albeit niche.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#174Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#175I 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…
You just described why commodity servers won over engineered systems that came before Oxide (like Nutanix, Sun / Oracle Exa*, VCE etc). So I totally agree with your go-to-market comment, because it’s also a bet against cloud. I wish them luck though.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#176Earlier 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.
I think the whole 'existing company is not doing something, therefore its a bad idea' is a really dangerous take.
Oxide is also not just exactly, OCP, they share some aspects, but Oxide racks are optimized for typical DC of large organizations. Maybe there is a balance there that matters.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. If you want on prem cloud infra without having to roll it yourself, Oxide is the solution. (no affiliation, just a fan)
If you want on prem infra in exactly the shape and form Oxide delivers* I've read and understood from Joyent and SmartOS that they believe fault tolerant block devices / filesystems is the wrong abstraction, your software should handle losing storage.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
We're getting to the point where people are building large clusters of Raspberry Pis and the like for hobbyist projects, so I hope that within a few years, the concept of "full-rack level" can encompass hardware with hundreds of nodes small and cheap enough to be packed into a "rack" that still fits under a desk and sells for a couple grand.
In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have to settle for exploring your code and listening to your podcast!
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#179They do have a good point here. If you do the total power budget on a typical 1U (discrete chassis, not blade) server which is packed full of a wall of 40mm fans pushing air, the highest speed screaming 40mm 12VDC fans can be 20W electrical load each . It's easy to "spend" at least 120W at maximum heat from the CPUs, in a dual socket system, just on the fans to pull air from the front/cold side of the server through…
FWIW, we had to have the idle speed of our fans lowered because the usual idle of around 5k RPM was WAY too much cooling. We generally run our fans at around 2.5kRPM (barely above idle). This is due to not only the larger fans, but also the fact that we optimized and prioritized as little restriction on airflow as possible. If you’ve taken apart a current gen 1U/2U server and then compare that to how little our airfl…
What does this mean? Can one actually get too much cooling? Do you get like condensation and stuff, that kind of "too much cooling" ?
I'm not being snarky, i actually don't know.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#180What I don't get is why tie to such an ancient platform. AMD Milan is my home lab. The new 9004 Epycs are so much better on power efficiency. I'm sure they've done their market research and the gains must be so significant. We used to have a few petabytes and tens of thousands of cores almost ten years ago and it's crazy how much higher data and compute density you can get with modern 30 TiB disks and Epyc 9654s. 100…
in one of his talks Bryan Cantrill talks about how AMD cpus were meant to be booted off a uefi microcode, and AMD themselves told them such... Until they kinda reverse engineered the AGESA thingy and made the cpu boot without bios/uefi.
I guess that's the kind of things that take a lot of time... the first time. In the future they'll likely to be iterating faster.
EDIT: i wrote the comment above to the best of my knowledge, somebody from Oxide might chime in and maybe add some more details :)