Here’s a sobering thought: today, data centers already consume 1-2% of the world’s power, and that percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. According to Goldman Sachs research, that rise will include a doubling in data center carbon dioxide emissions. As the data and AI boom progresses, this thirst for power shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Two key challenges quickly become evident for the 85% of IT that currently lives on-premises.
How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions?
How can organizations keep pace with AI innovation as existing data centers run out of available power?
Rack-scale design is critical to improved data center efficiency
Traditional data center IT consumes so much power because the fundamental unit of compute is an individual server; like a house where rooms were built one at a time, with each room having its own central AC unit, gas furnace, and electrical panel. Individual rackmount servers are stacked together, each with their own AC power supplies, cooling fans, and power management. They are then paired with storage appliances and network switches that communicate at arm’s length, not designed as a cohesive whole. This approach fundamentally limits organizations' ability to maintain sustainable, high-efficiency computing systems.
Of course, hyperscale public cloud providers did not design their data center systems this way. Instead, they operate like a carefully planned smart home where everything is designed to work together cohesively and is operated by software that understands the home’s systems end-to-end. High-efficiency, rack-scale computers are deployed at scale and operate as a single unit with integrated storage and networking to support elastic cloud computing services. This modern architecture is made available to the market as public cloud, but that rental-only model is ill-fit for many business needs.
At Oxide, we’ve taken this lesson in advancing rack-scale design, improved upon it in several ways, and made it available for every organization to purchase and operate anywhere in the world without a tether back to the public cloud. Our Cloud Computer treats the entire rack as a single, unified computer rather than a collection of independent parts, achieving unprecedented power efficiency.
By designing the hardware and software together, we’ve eliminated unnecessary components and optimized every aspect of system operation through a control plane with visibility to end-to-end operations.
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 — despite being unequivocally the right way to build it! — represented everything wrong with the legacy approach.
The bus bar in the Oxide Cloud Computer is not merely more efficient, it is a concrete embodiment of the tremendous gains from designing at rack-scale, and by integrating hardware with software.
The improvements we’re seeing are rooted in technical innovation
Replacing low-efficiency AC power supplies with a high-efficiency DC Bus Bar
Power conversion is performed once AC power is fed from the data center to the Oxide universal power shelf with a customized power shelf controller (PSC). 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 power shelf also ensures the load is balanced across phases, something that’s impossible with traditional power distribution units found in legacy server racks.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.Purpose-built for power efficiency
Oxide server sleds have less restrictive airflow than legacy servers by eliminating extraneous components like PCIe risers, storage backplanes, and more. Legacy servers need many optional components like these because they could be used for any number of tasks, such as point-of-sale systems, data center servers, or network-attached-storage (NAS) systems. Still, they were never designed optimally for any one of those tasks. The Oxide Cloud Computer was designed from the ground up to be a rack-scale cloud computing powerhouse, and so it’s optimized for exactly that task.Hardware + Software designed together
The Oxide Cloud Computer includes a robust cloud control plane with deep observability to the full system. By designing the hardware and software together, we can make hardware choices like more intelligent DC-DC power converters that can provide rich telemetry to our control plane, enabling future feature enhancements such as dynamic power capping and efficiency-based workload placement that are impossible with legacy servers and software systems.
The Bottom Line: Customers and the Environment Both Benefit
Reducing data center power demands and achieving more useful computing per kilowatt requires fundamentally rethinking traditional data center utilization and compute design. At Oxide, we’ve proven that dramatic efficiency gains are possible when you rethink the computer at rack-scale with hardware and software designed thoughtfully and rigorously together.
Ready to learn how your organization can achieve these results? Schedule time with our team here.
Together, we can reclaim on-premises computing efficiency to achieve both business and sustainability goals.