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How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

(oxide.computer)
195 points tosh | 5 comments | 21 Nov 24 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.719s | source
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unsnap_biceps ◴[21 Nov 24 20:29 UTC] No.42208296[source]▶
> 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.

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1. bigfatkitten ◴[21 Nov 24 21:00 UTC] No.42208599[source]▶
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, a lot of procurement overhead, and a lot of different vendors pointing fingers at each other when something doesn't work.

If you're Amazon or Google, you can do this stuff yourself. If you're a normal company, you probably won't have the inhouse expertise.

On the other hand, Oxide sells a turnkey IaaS platform that you can just roll off the pallet, plug in and start using immediately. You only need to pay one company, and you have one company to yell at if something goes wrong.

You can buy a rack of 1-2U machines from Dell, HPE or Cisco with VMware or some other HCI platform, but you don't get that power efficiency or the really nice control plane Oxide have on their platform.

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2. leoc ◴[22 Nov 24 01:14 UTC] No.42210322[source]▶
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.
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3. unsnap_biceps ◴[22 Nov 24 03:02 UTC] No.42210759[source]▶
Supermicro does sell OCP racks.

https://www.supermicro.com/solutions/Solution-Brief-Supermic...

I recall them offering older versions of the specs but can't easily find a reference, so I might be wrong about how accessible they were.

4. kjellsbells ◴[22 Nov 24 04:01 UTC] No.42211067[source]▶
Azure tried this, not with their hyperscaler stuff, but with Azure Operator Nexus.

Basically an "opinionated" combination of Dell, Arista, and Pure storage with a special Azure AKS running on top and a metric ton of management and orchestration smarts. The target customer base was telcos who needed local capabilities in their data centers and who might otherwise have gone to OCP.

As far as I can surmise, it's dead, but not EOLed. Microsoft nuked the operator business unit earlier in the year, and judging by recent job postings from contract shops, AT&T might be the only customer.

5. panick21_ ◴[23 Nov 24 19:44 UTC] No.42223364[source]▶
These companies are looked into their way of doing things. Also, they would be competing with themselves. It would also require more work on their side then they do now.

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.