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How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

(oxide.computer)
195 points tosh | 3 comments | 21 Nov 24 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.629s | source
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shivak ◴[21 Nov 24 20:31 UTC] No.42208324[source]▶
> > 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.

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1. jsolson ◴[21 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42208748[source]▶
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.

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2. immibis ◴[21 Nov 24 21:26 UTC] No.42208826[source]▶
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.
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3. eaasen ◴[21 Nov 24 22:17 UTC] No.42209260[source]▶
This is how our rack works (Oxide employee). In each power shelf, there are 6 power supplies and only 5 need to be functional to run at full load. If you want even more redundancy, you can use both power shelves with independent power feeds to each so even if you lose a feed, the rack still has 5+1 redundant power supplies.