How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

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

A ~20U rack working off residential 15/20A would have been so cool.

Though given how it's designed for the datacenters, I'd expect the thing to be pretty darn loud.

> Though given how it's designed for the datacenters, I'd expect the thing to be pretty darn loud.

It's actually very much the opposite: the rack is very, very quiet. You can hear for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYcgPRIWf6I

That is quiet, indeed! Have you done any decibel measurements by any chance? I wonder how loud it would be when compared to just ambient residential noise level.

I don't remember off the top of my head.

It's quiet enough that one customer is putting one just straight-up on their office floor, rather than in a colo somewhere. I've stood next to one in our office (which is a big garage, no soundproofing, so sound otherwhere bounces around a lot) and had conversations easily.

Thanks for the info, it would definitely pass the WAF gate from that perspective :)

Isn't most of their stuff open source?

I kinda feel we need minicomputers back in this age of computing. Instead of making one giant rack that doesn’t fit through doorways, they should make a 4 ft tall unit that stacks. At least once they’re established enough that they can manage doing small installs instead of full data centers. I’ve looked around and there are tiny forklifts they could use to install 2 at once.

Just the power demands for their full rack exceed capacity for most office spaces.

That and someone needs to make a rack that has a port to plug a glycol line directly into. Doesn’t have to be Oxide, but someone should.

It is, but if you're running on different hardware than us, you'd have to do a bunch of porting. Buying a solution would be a lot simpler, as we'd have already done the porting.

Have you thought of building an affordable small-scale product for home labs and maybe SMBs? Even if that line didn't turn a profit, it could function as a loss leader in getting engineers and consultants familiar with Oxide, and an opportunity to experiment with (and ultimately evangelize) your tech stack without needing to already have an enterprise-scale use case.

In general, we love the love we get from homelab folks, but the issue is that the current thesis of our designs is "take advantage of the scale of building at the full-rack level."

We really can't afford to do loss leaders before we have more of a business. It's already difficult enough to build a company like this, and that's with making money off of sales. I fully agree that in general, this idea completely makes sense, but you can only really employ it once you have a business to be able to absorb those losses. Right now, building and selling the current product takes up 110% of our time.

I respect that, and I hope you get to that point! As a tech leader in a organization that currently falls short of the scale we'd need to justify Oxide products, I'm hoping that day comes soon.

We're getting to the point where people are building large clusters of Raspberry Pis and the like for hobbyist projects, so I hope that within a few years, the concept of "full-rack level" can encompass hardware with hundreds of nodes small and cheap enough to be packed into a "rack" that still fits under a desk and sells for a couple grand.

In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have to settle for exploring your code and listening to your podcast!