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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

#41

Post by immibis »

jsolson wrote: post #35
shivak wrote: post #17

> > The power shelf distributes DC power up and down the rack via a bus bar. This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodat…

The bus bar itself is an SPoF, but it's also just dumb copper. That doesn't mean that nothing can go wrong, but it's pretty far into the tail of the failure distribution. The power shelf that keeps the busbar fed will have multiple rectifiers, often with at least N+1 redundancy so that you can have a rectifier fail and swap it without the rack itself failing. Similar things apply to the battery shelves.

It's also plausible to have multiple power supplies feeding the same bus bar in parallel (if they're designed to support this) e.g. one at each end of a row.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#42

Post by bigfatkitten »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #6
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.

There is a rack mount version of the Mac Pro you can buy

That's designed for the broadcast market, where they rack mount everything in the studio environment. It's not really a server, it has no out of band management, redundant power etc.

There are third party rack mounts available for the Mac Mini and Mac Studio also.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#43

Post by jclulow »

iamthepieman wrote: post #31
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?

Every old telco technician had a story about dropping a wrench on a busbar or other bare piece of high powered transmission equipment and having to shut that center down, get out the heavy equipment, and cut it off because the wrench had been welded to the bus bars.

Note that the rack doesn't accept DC input, like lots of (e.g., NEBS certified) telco equipment. There's a bus bar, but it's enclosed within the rack itself. The rack takes single- or three-phase AC inputs to power the rectifiers, which are then attached to the internal bus bar.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#45

Post by fracus »

dralley wrote: post #34
shivak wrote: post #17

> > The power shelf distributes DC power up and down the rack via a bus bar. This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodat…

>This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. I'll happily take a single high qualify power supply (which may have internal redundancy FWIW) over 70 much more cheaply made power supplies that stress other parts of my datacenter via sheer inefficiency, and also costs more in aggreg…

No one drives down the highway with one tire either.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#46

Post by lillecarl »

hn-throw wrote: post #40
dralley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. I'll happily take a single high qualify power supply (which may have internal redundancy FWIW) over 70 much more cheaply made power supplies that stress other parts of my datacenter via sheer inefficiency, and also costs more in aggreg…

Let's say your high quality supply's yearly failure rate is 100 times less than the cheap ones The probability of at least a single failure is 1-(1-r)^70. This is quite high even w/out considering the higher quality of the one supply. The probability of all 70 going down is r^70 which is absurdly low. Let's say r = 0.05 or one failed supply every 20 in a year. 1-(1-r)^70 = 97% r^70 The high quality supply has r = 0.0…

Yeah but the failure rate of an analog piece of copper is pretty low, it'll keep being copper unless you do stupid things. You'll have multiple power supplies provide power on the same piece of copper

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#47

Post by packetlost »

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?

Illumos is the OS for the hypervisor and core services, they don't expect their customers to run their code directly on that OS, but inside VMs.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#48

Post by AcerbicZero »

fracus wrote: post #45
dralley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. I'll happily take a single high qualify power supply (which may have internal redundancy FWIW) over 70 much more cheaply made power supplies that stress other parts of my datacenter via sheer inefficiency, and also costs more in aggreg…

No one drives down the highway with one tire either.

Careful, unicyclists are an unforgiving bunch.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#49

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

zamalek wrote: post #25
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…

It's normally incredibly difficult for employees to disrupt at massive companies that would be the type which runs a data center. Disruption usually enters the corp in a sales deck, much like the one Oxide would have. It's stupid, but that's why we all have jobs.

I think engineers should be more forceful to lead their own visions instead being led by accountants and lawyers.

After engineers have the power of implementation and de-implementstion. They need to step into dirty politics and bend other people's views.

It's either theirs or ours. Win-win is a fallacy.

Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

#50

Post by lillecarl »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #37
AlotOfReading wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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