Google Joins Open Compute Project; More News From OCP U.S. Summit 2016

The Open Compute Project--launched by Facebook in April 2011 to bring efficiency to data centers and storage—welcomed a powerful new member this week: Google. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg welcomed Google to the OCP in a Facebook post (embedded below), writing: Data centers power the Internet. They're the nervous system that allows all kinds of services to run--including Facebook. But until five years ago, the largest technology companies all designed their data centers and computing infrastructure in secret. They viewed this technology as a competitive advantage to beat others in the industry. We realized that if we opened up our designs and shared our progress with the industry, we'd all make faster progress together. By working together, we'd produce more efficient designs that would save energy, protect the environment and build better infrastructure for our community. Today, Google joined the Open Compute Project. Google has always built some of the best infrastructure in the industry, so this is strong symbolic move that our open model of development is the best way forward for everyone. Over the next decade, we're going to build experiences that rely more on technology, like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These will require a lot more computing power, and through efforts like OCP, we're developing a global infrastructure to enable everyone to enjoy them. Facebook also took advantage of OCP U.S. Summit 2016 in San Jose, Calif., to tout advances in open computing over the past year and announce some new developments. OCP highlights from the past year included: Equinix announced its adoption of the Wedge network-switch design and open-source architecture. Goldman Sachs announced that more than 80 percent of the servers it has acquired since last summer are based on OCP standards. IDC predicted that nearly one-half of all hyperscale servers sold globally will be based on OCP standards by 2020. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced plans to deploy a series of OCP-inspired high-performance computing clusters. Penguin Computing deployed YJ America’s OpenStack infrastructure on its Relion OCP servers for Yahoo Japan. The telecommunications industry was brought into the fold with the launches of the OCP Telco Project and the Telecom Infra Project. Highlights of product announcement made at OCP U.S. Summit 2016 follow: Facebook introduced Lightning, which it described as “a flash building block--a flash sled--that we can use to better scale out the flash capacity across multiple applications and tune the compute-to-storage ratio.” Facebook announced that the OpenBMC board-management software it introduced at last year’s OCP Summit will now support storage and, specifically, Lightning. The designs for the 6-pack modular switch platform and Wedge operating-system-agnostic top-of-rack switch were opened. Facebook announced the redesign of its front-end servers to improve performance without using more power. Readers: What are your thoughts on Google joining the Open Compute Project?

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Google Joins Open Compute Project; More News From OCP U.S. Summit 2016

The Open Compute Project--launched by Facebook in April 2011 to bring efficiency to data centers and storage—welcomed a powerful new member this week: Google.

David Cohen

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David Cohen