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.

> 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.

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.

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.