Big News on Day One of OCP Summit

Today, we kicked off the first day of the Open Compute Project U.S. Summit 2015. Nearly 3,000 people gathered to openly share and learn about the technologies that are redefining the data center and moving our industry forward. Thanks to all who attended and to all those who tuned in via the livestream.

I'm happy to say that the OCP community's influence has gained a lot of momentum in the past year, with new contributions and membership from companies like HP, Dell, Cisco, Apple and Microsoft. We have nearly 200 companies now participating in the project, and every day new technologies are being developed and contributed.

We have passed the tipping point where OCP gear is no longer an experiment. Major companies and vendors have pivoted from proprietary interests and are working together to bring open datacenter technologies to market. We saw the open source model work for software, and now we know it can be done with hardware. Companies can openly collaborate and come out ahead. There is still work to be done in enabling adoption, but the momentum we've built on community and technology is undeniable. Thank you for making this another special Open Compute Project Summit.

A recap of exciting partner news announced today is below. Be sure to tune in to the live stream tomorrow to check out more talks from leaders at Facebook, Intel, HP, Hyve, Microsoft and other top companies.

Facebook

Facebook announced “Yosemite” and “Mono Lake,” a proposed contribution for its first system-on-a-chip compute server that supports independent 4 servers at a performance-per-watt superior to traditional datacenter servers for heavily parallelizable workloads. It is an ideal component for our disaggregated rack infrastructure. Additionally, Facebook proposed a contribution the spec for its top-of-rack network switch, “Wedge,” and announced “OpenBMC,” its open low-level board management software that enables flexibility and speed in feature development for BMC chips. Lastly, Facebook announced that it's opening its central library of “FBOSS,” the software behind Wedge.

Intel

Intel and Facebook collaborated for over 18 months on Yosemite, which uses a server card, Mono Lake, that is based on the new Intel Xeon processor D-1500 product family, the company’s first Xeon-based SoC. The Xeon D product family is the first Xeon line built on 14nm process technology and the third generation of Intel 64-bit SoCs for microservers, storage, network and the Internet of Things (IoT).  

HP

HP announced today a new portfolio designed specifically for the needs of service providers to create differentiated services, increase speed and agility, and drive business growth. As part of this announcement, HP introduced HP Cloudline, a new family of compute platforms that enable service providers running hyperscale IT architectures to maximize data center efficiency and increase cloud service agility. With HP Cloudline, HP is further extending its open infrastructure vision from cloud and network switches to include servers. Open solutions accelerate innovation and provide service providers with the flexibility required for rapid growth.

Mellanox

Mellanox announced that the OpenOptics MSA is contributing the developed wavelength specifications to the Open Compute Project. The new specification enables data to be streamed at terabits per second over a single fiber and is part of Mellanox’s mission to drive a faster pace of innovation that focuses on energy efficiency and bandwidth scalability in data center technologies. Mellanox also announced Mellanox Multi-Host™, an innovative technology that provides high flexibility and major savings in building next generation, scalable Cloud, Web 2.0 and high-performance data centers.

Broadcom

Broadcom announced the availability of the Broadcom Open Network Switch Library (OpenNSL), a new software platform for Original Equipment Markers (OEMs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and network operators. OpenNSL is a software interface with a set of APIs that enable the development of new applications on top of Broadcom StrataXGS® switches, giving customers the flexibility to tailor their network equipment and meet their unique infrastructure requirements.

Cumulus

Cumulus Networks announced today that they contributed the “ACPI Platform Description” or APD to OCP as a new industry standard for networking hardware and operating system integration. They’ve extended ACPI, broadly used with servers and PCs, for use with bare metal switches.

Accton

Edge-Core (Accton’s subsidiary) announced today the Wedge-16X top-of-rack switch, which is the first commercial product implementation of the Wedge design that Facebook contributed to OCP. Accton also announced that it will open source through the Open Compute Project (OCP) two new data center switch designs— the industry’s first open design of a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch to enable continued capacity growth of web-scale infrastructures, and a cost optimized 40GbE switch design for deployment of current open infrastructures based on 10GbE and 40GbE.

Hyve

Hyve announced Open Rack v2, Leopard, Honey Badger and Wedge products. Datacenter customers can source the latest Open Compute Project server, storage and networking solutions direct from Hyve Solutions. Hyve also announced a partnership with Cavium, Inc. to bring 64-bit ARM-based volume server solutions to market via its AmbientSeries, addressing the hyper-scale cloud and data center market as well as the industry’s first dual-socket ARMv8 Open Compute platform.

NetBRIC

NetBRIC joins OCP as the first contribution from China. NetBRIC aims to redefine the FLASH storage architecture of the big data, cloud computing era.