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Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):
HoffmanLabs@infosec.exchange ("Stephen Hoffman") wrote:
Interesting write up on Oxide Computer in El Reg:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/oxide_3000lb_blade_server/
Oxide is aiming at on-premises cloud, and at racks.
This approach is what has become of server consolidation.
Particularly for your “base load” computing.
Racks are an interesting and oft-neglected topic in IT.
The enterprise vendors I'm familiar with always treated the racks and server and server rack mounting largely as an afterthought. At best.
And enterprise rack gear was too often awful. At best.
Lone exception: Apple had some of the best rack gear and rack mounting gear with Xserve, but then they got out of that business.
Much of what else I've met has been some combination of atrocious, inconsistent, and unavailable.
And getting stuff mounted was a struggle, absent server lifts or other tooling.
And the racks are, as Cantrill states, pretty much the fundamental unit for enterprise servers these days.
The Marvel-class AlphaServer GS1280 sorta-kinda did do an integrated design with their racks, and the whole of that computer and its constituent parts were all managed and maintained utilizing the in-cabinet network and the in-cabinet crossbars, but Marvel itself never became a unit of server construction, and while it had power distribution within the rack, it was never integrated with the data center power. The Marvel-class management UI and error management definitely needed work, though.
https://www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/jschulen/urz_hpc/marvel/marvel_performance.pdf
The folks at HP and later as HPE went after blades hard, but they seemingly never adapted those designs to whole racks. Just big rack-mount blade boxes (c7000 was 10U, peaked at ~240 kg), and the HP/HPE BladeSystem communications interconnects and mezzanines were a whole ‘nother area of complexity. After the BladeSystem boxes faded, then with Moonshot and Apollo and some other servers.
Some vendors dabbled in containerized data centers, but seldom racks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_data_center
Yes, some servers were configured for carrier-grade installs, too.
Oxide looks quite interesting, given the scale and scope if the integration they're aiming for, and not that I have anything that will likely ever need that much compute power. Looks like a fun development project, too.
cc/ @bcantrill
#hp #hpe #alphaserver #digitalequipment #digitalequipmentcorp #apple #server #oxide #oxidecomputer