Hey, it’s Bryan from Oxide back with another FAQ Friday. And a question we get is, where are the power supplies in the system? You keep saying there’s a DC bus bar that runs DC up and down the rack, and I know that sleds blind mate into that DC bus bar, but where, who does the actual conversion from AC to DC?
Where does that happen?
The answer is that happens here. That happens in the power shelf. The power shelf is a series of rectifiers. And when we were looking at this, one of the very important things for us is finding the right partner for our rectifier. What were we looking for in a partner?
Well, one, we of course wanted one that made a high quality power supply. This is, Murata is our PSU partner. We of course wanted one that had a high quality unit, which this absolutely is. But the other thing that we wanted to be able to do is really build in in-depth monitoring of these power supply units.
And so in particular, we were looking for a partner around which we could develop really custom software and hardware. So what we actually developed is, in addition to using the Murata power shelf and the power supplies, we developed our own power shelf controller. The power shelf controller plugs in to this PMBus interface and is able to speak to these power supply units.
And this thing has our service processor on it and is over our management network and allows us to integrate deeply with the Murata power supply, so we can do things like manage its firmware. There’s firmware running on these things. These things are really sophisticated units, and we have had issues where in order to be able to deliver what a customer needed, we needed to be able to update the firmware on these things.
That firmware update is handled by this power shelf controller, and our partnership with Murata allows us to do it. It’s another example, another concrete example of the power of hardware, software, co-design that we have here at Oxide.
Thanks, and see you next time.