Open Compute Project: What Are the Benefits for Enterprise Data Centers?

The OCP’s promise is that numerous professionals and complementary companies will collaborate freely to establish a standard that enables the widespread and free transfer of technology.

This innovative approach is changing the game by providing operators with more efficient and high-performance processing and storage solutions. Launched by a Facebook engineer in 2011, the OCP enables operators to acquire more powerful hardware. It also allows project members to connect with one another based on the values of sharing and collaboration. For these data center operators, it is no longer a matter of operating in isolation.

What is the goal of the OCP’s designers? It is a paradigm shift. Thanks to this project, it is easier for operators of hyperscale and other data centers to acquire, on a royalty-free basis, high-performance IT infrastructure that consumes less energy. The consortium provides access to detailed and/or technical blueprints for building processing and storage environments, as well as for their operation (power supply/cooling).

With the standardization of new open-source hardware technologies, industry giants such as Microsoft, Rackspace, and Facebook can now celebrate the progress of this project, which has already gained a large following.

Today, operators of hyperscale data centers have the means to build cost-effective OCP server hardware. The project promotes the exchange and sharing of design and development techniques for server hardware and open-source components.

The project’s open-hardware approach gives companies a degree of independence, allowing them to procure computer hardware without relying on major market players. This autonomy from manufacturers and industry giants represents a real step forward and a new opportunity.

The second advantage lies in the decentralized and modular architecture of OCP hardware. This architecture, combined with virtualization, provides greater flexibility while simplifying infrastructure management. In this regard, there has been a fundamental shift in everything that previously hindered server efficiency.

The third major advantage of the OCP relates to energy efficiency. Based on a power supply architecture using 48V buses, the savings resulting from reduced power loss in the secure power supply are promising.

The launch of the open-source hardware project did not attract the expected turnout. However, since then, many players have joined this collaborative community to take advantage of the numerous technological opportunities it offers. Industry giants such as Dell, Intel, Apple, Google, VMware, and AMD have joined Facebook’s initiative.

After five years in operation, this business consortium had the distinction of welcoming Google in 2016. The consortium is gaining influence and attracting more members thanks to the innovative, royalty-free solutions it offers to its members.

Facebook claims to have saved nearly $1.2 billion over three years thanks to the Open Compute Project. The same results are evident among other major players, such as Riot Games, a video game giant. Thus, the benefits of this global collaboration among leaders in the IT hardware and infrastructure industry are already visible in practice. This suggests a small technological revolution is underway, bringing together a large portion of the IT sector’s players around a common goal: making data center IT equipment more efficient, customizable, and scalable.

This is one of the goals of the Open Compute Project: to facilitate the widespread adoption of technological solutions resulting from collaboration. The specifications are therefore flexible and freely accessible to interested organizations. To date, several consortium members have brought Open Compute solutions to market that integrate various aspects of the data center. As a result, the initiative has brought the issues of storage and networking in data centers to the forefront of discussions. Several other topics are being brought back into focus thanks to this international consortium.

In addition, the consortium’s member companies are releasing the specifications for innovative hardware under open hardware licenses. This includes companies such as Microsoft (Project Olympus, Cerberus, Dernali, etc.), Facebook (Switch Wedge, etc.), and many others that have introduced—and continue to bring to market—Open Compute solutions.

To date, the main advances have included:

• Open-source hardware servers based on various architectures (ARM, Intel, etc.)
• Electrical management systems
• Server racks that meet the latest standards
• High-performance storage systems
• Switches and all types of network equipment

In addition, OCP members regularly publish or make available to the public new, detailed specifications.