How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

"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...

> it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that...

I didn't see any mention of Rust in the article?

That's an interesting take. What's your reasoning? Whats your evidence?

They wrote their own BMC and various other bits and pieces in Rust. That's an extremely tiny part of the whole picture.

OSS Rust in Rack trenchcoat.

The raison d'être of Oxide isn't Rust, it's continuing to pretend that the bloated corpse of Solaris still has some signs of life.

It’s significantly more than that, but it’s also true that we include stuff in other languages where appropriate. CockroachDB is in Go, and illumos is in C, as two examples. But almost all new code we write is in Rust. That is the stuff you’re talking about, but also like, our control plane.

Oh and we write a lot of Typescript too.

Pretty much everything Oxide publishes on github is either in rust or it's an sdk to service in rust. Well and web panel isn'tin rust, so negative points for that, true evangelists would have used WASM.

But Oxide reason to exist is to keep memory of cool racks from Sun running Solaris alive forever.

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master/ looks alive to me.

(And for that matter, Oracle's proprietary Solaris seems better maintained than I ever expected, though in this context I think the open source fork is the relevant thing to look at.)

18MW/year is not a real unit of measurement; did you mean MWh?

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 with the last two of those goals.

We also sell computers... :)

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.