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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 attractive. They're 3x more expensive than our existing hardware, two generations behind (I'm aware they're on track for a refresh) and don't have any GPUs. E.g. what I would have loved to see is just an after-market BMC/NIC/firmware solution using their stack. Plug it into a cheap Gigabyte system (their BMC is pluggable and NIC is OCP) and just have the control plane manage it as a whole box. I'd have easily paid serveral thousand $ per server just for that. All the rack scale integration, virtualization, migration, network storage, etc stuff is cool, but not everyone needs it. Get your foot in the door at customers, build up some volume for better deals with AMD, and then start building the custom rack stuff ... Of course it's easy to be a critic from the side lines. As I said, I do really love what the Oxide folks are doing, I just really hope it'll become possible for me to buy their gear at some point.

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

> 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 could purchase racks if they wanted, but it seems like, by large, people didn't care enough to go whole hog in on it.

Wonder if the economics have changed or if it's still just neat but won't move the needle.

If any Oxide staff are here, I'm just curious, is BlueSky a customer? Seems like it would fit well with their on-prem setup.

> Here’s a sobering thought: today, data centers already consume 1-2% of the world’s power, and that percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade.

I don't get this marketing angle. I've made arguments here before that the cost of compute from a energy perspective is often negligible. If Google Maps, for example, can save you 1 mile due to better routing, then that is several orders of magnitude more efficient [1].

If it uses less resources, it uses less resources. Everybody (businesses and individuals) loves that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=huijzer&next=4206549...

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.

> > 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 accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. In general, the cost savings advertised by cloud infrastructure should be more holistic.

I’m rooting for solutions like this as an alternative to the public cloud. I do see that an org would rely on one company that theoretically can do a ‘Broadcom VMware’ on them but I don’t get this vibe from 0x1d3 at all.

But they target large orgs, I wish a solution like this would be accessible for smaller companies.

I wish I could throw their stack on my second hand cots hardware, rent a few U’s in two colos for geo redundancy and cry of happiness each month realizing how much money we save on public cloud cost, yet having cloud capabilities/benefits

> How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions?

Stop running so much useless stuff.

Also maybe ARM over x86_64 and similar power-efficiency-oriented hardware.

Rack-level system design, or at least power & cooling design, is certainly also a reasonable thing to do. But standardization is probably important here, rather than some bespoke solution which only one provider/supplier offers.

> How can organizations keep pace with AI innovation as existing data centers run out of available power?

Waste less energy on LLM chatbots?

"If only they used DC from the wall socket, all those H100s would be green" is, not, I think, the hill you want to die on.

But, yeah, my three 18MW/y racks agree that more power efficiency would be nice, it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that...

Where is the GPU?

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?

What 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 such nodes and you have 10k cores and really fast data. I can't see myself running a 7003-series datacenter anymore unless the Oxide gains are that big.

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?

From the title, I was expecting to read about how oxidation (aka rust) reduces power throughput capacity

How long before a VPS pops up running Oxide racks? Or, why wouldn't a VPS build on top of Oxide if they offer better efficiency and server management?

They 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 to the rear heat exhaust.

Just going up to 60mm or 80mm standard size DC fans can be a huge efficiency increase in watt-hours spent per cubic meters of air moved per hour.

I am extremely skeptical of the "12x" but using larger fans is more efficient.

from the URL linked:

> Bigger fans = bigger efficiency gains Oxide server sleds are designed to a custom form factor to accommodate larger fans than legacy servers typically use. These fans can move more air more efficiently, cooling the systems using 12x less energy than legacy servers, which each contain as many as 7 fans, which must work much harder to move air over system components.

See perhaps "Oxide Cloud Computer Tour - Rear":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4