Duh! I got tricked by the things near the PDU as "oh, these must be the pure-compute nodes".
So maybe that's the better question: what are the 4U worth of stuff surrounding the power? More networking stuff? Management stuff? (There was some swivel to the back of the rack / with networking, but I can't find it now)
Edit: Ahh! The rotating view is on /product and so that ~4U is the fiber. (Hat tip to Jon Olson, too)
Control-plane most likely, and having a mid-centered PDU probably adds to heat on the upper stack, which shortens life over time.
As someone who has designed quite a few datacenters, whats more interesting to me in this evolution of computing is the reduction in cabling.
Cabling in a DC is a huge suck on all aspects - plastics, power, blah blah blah - the list is long....
But there are a LOT of cabling companies that do LV out there - so the point is that when these types of systems get more "obelisk" like, are many of these companies going to die? (I'm looking at you Cray and SGI.)
When I worked at Intel - I had a friend who was a proc designer at MIPS - and we talked about rack insertion and a global back-plane for the rack (which we all know to be common now) - but this was ~1997 or so... but when I built the Brocade HQ - cables were still massive and it was an art to properly dress them.
Lucas was the same - so many human work hours spent on just cable mgmt...
Their diagrams of system resiliency is odd in my opinion:
That looks like a ton of failures that they can negotiate...
Whats weird is the SPF isn't going to be in your DC/HQ/Whatever - its going to be outside - this is why we have always sought +2+ carrier ISPs or built private infra...
A freaking semi truck crashed into a telephone pole in Sacramento the other day and wiped comcast off the map to half the region.
Thats ONE fiber line that brought down 100K+ connections...
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EDIT: I guess what I am actually saying is that this entire marketing strat is to convince any companies that *"failure is imminent and please buy things that are going to fail, but don't worry because you bought plenty more things to live beyond the epic failure that these devices will have"*
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Not to discredit anything this company has going for its product - but their name is literally "RUST" (*oxide*) --- which we all know is what kills metal.
On the topic of naming, there was thought put into it...
> With accelerating conviction that we would build a company to do this, we needed a name — and once we hit on Oxide, we knew it was us: oxides form much of the earth’s crust, giving a connotation of foundation; silicon, the element that is the foundation of all of computing, is found in nature in its oxide; and (yes!) iron oxide is also known as Rust, a programming language we see playing a substantial role for us. Were there any doubt, that Oxide can also be pseudo-written in hexadecimal — as 0x1de — pretty much sealed the deal!
So maybe that's the better question: what are the 4U worth of stuff surrounding the power? More networking stuff? Management stuff? (There was some swivel to the back of the rack / with networking, but I can't find it now)
Edit: Ahh! The rotating view is on /product and so that ~4U is the fiber. (Hat tip to Jon Olson, too)