Oxide Computer raises $445 million to increase data center rack production

Data center hardware startup Oxide Computer Inc. announced today that it has raised $445 million in funding.

Returning backer Eclipse Capital led the Series D round. They were joined by AMD Ventures, Riot Ventures, Jane Street, Atreides Management and USIT, which led Oxide’s previous $200 million capital raise in February.

Oxide sells a data center rack that combines computing, storage and networking equipment in a pre-integrated package. It contains 24 hardware modules, called sleds. Each sled houses a central processing unit with up to 144 cores from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The CPU has access to approximately 1.64 terabytes of memory and up to 300 terabytes of flash memory.

The core components of each sled are supported by a custom chip called the Oxide Server Processor. It is responsible for optimizing the operating temperatures in the module. In addition, the chip manages power flow and installs firmware updates.

The carriages in an Oxide rack are connected to each other by two switches. The switches use a custom routing protocol to create a continuously updated map of the rack’s internal network. If the map shows that a network component is not functioning properly, the switches route traffic around it to avoid slowdowns.

The storage equipment of the rack also includes reliability optimizations. It creates three copies of each data set and stores them in different flash modules to ensure redundancy. In the background, a so-called checksum mechanism looks for any data errors that need to be corrected.

The carriages, storage devices and switches draw power from two power racks. Each shelf contains six rectifiers, devices that lower the voltage of incoming power to make it suitable for use by chips. There is also a modified version of the Oxide Service Processor that tracks power shelf health and energy consumption.

Customers can split the hardware into multiple virtual networks in an Oxide rack. For example, a software company might create a separate environment for each engineering team. Data traffic between environments is regulated by an integrated firewall.

“The increasing pace of on-prem cloud computing projects has forced us to increase our production capacity 20-fold in the last 12 months, and yet demand still exceeds supply,” said Steve Tuck, co-founder and CEO of Oxide. “This financing will allow us to invest heavily in the materials and manufacturing scale our customers need in the coming years.”

Oxide will also improve its rack design. In August the company disclosed plans to develop a version of its computer sled that can accommodate a graphics card. Oxide indicated that it would seek to partner with AMD on this initiative.

Photo: Oxide Computer