Event Summary: OCP U.S. Summit 2016

On March 9th and 10th, we hosted our seventh OCP U.S. Summit 2016 at the San Jose Convention Center. We welcomed more than 2,400 people, from 600 companies, and participation was stronger than ever. All of our event sessions are available online, so please visit our YouTube channel to watch our keynotes, executive tracks, and expo hall stage presentations.

Industry leaders took the main stage and presented a wide range of keynotes. OCP's President and Chairman, and VP of Infrastructure at Facebook, Jason Taylor welcomed the community, followed by a presentation from Jason Waxman, Corporate Vice President, Data Center Group, and GM Cloud Platforms Group, Intel, who talked about the future of open technology and that 70-80% of systems will be deployed in large scale data centers by 2025. Peter Winzer, Ph.D and Head of the Optical Transmissions Systems and Networks Research Department at Bell Labs, walked everyone through some of the company's history of industry-transforming innovation and applied those lessons to today. Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure, Microsoft announced new open source software for open networking in the cloud. Rachael King, Reporter at the Wall Street Journal, moderated a panel of executives from AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, and Deutsche Telekom about the future of telecommunications infrastructure. Jay Parikh, VP of Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook, announced a number of OCP contributions and then handed the microphone to surprise guest Urs Hölzle, SVP for Technical Infrastructure at Google who announced Google's OCP membership while providing an overview of the company's history of efficiency. To find more details on the keynote, please see our wrap-up here.

Our Platinum and Gold sponsors led our executive tracks this year to help shed light on new, forward-thinking technology that will help shape the future of OCP. Facebook discussed optical standards for data centers with Google, Microsoft, and Equinix. Intel also shared how they're working to design next-generation data center storage with non-volatile memory express (NVMe). Schneider Electric shared how their data centers can still achieve Tier 3 redundancy, with further discussions on availability and flexibility implications. Sony's Horst Schellong gave an interesting talk about how optical technology is optimized for data archival. Finally, StackVelocity discussed cloud orchestration, validation, and deployment resources.

With over 50 sessions and presentations from over 25 companies, the engineering workshops were a huge hit. Attendees were able to participate in two-way discussions with Microsoft, Facebook, Accton, SK Telecom, HP Enterprise, Google, Canonical, Cumulus Networks, Quanta, Wiwynn, Sony, and more.

The expo hall was packed throughout Summit. We heard from several companies that elaborated on their experiences deploying OCP, including Schneider Electric, Penguin Computing, Quanta, Emerson, Cavium, AMAX, Inspur, and HGST. Check out the crowd for yourself here.

Thank you to all of the sponsors this year who contributed to making the event a huge success. Please keep an eye out on our website for details about OCP U.S. Summit 2017.