OCP Summit Track News: Tracks 8-10

As part of our ongoing effort to keep our OCP Community updated, here is the next edition of the blog series "OCP Summit Track News."


We’re not just hardware engineers…. In fact, this year marks our 5th anniversary of having software-related products and projects in the OCP community. Beginning in 2013, the Open Network Installation Environment (ONIE) became the first software-related contribution to OCP. In 2014, Open Network Linux (ONL) was added to the OCP portfolio, follow by SONiC & SAI, and OOM in subsequent years. For the 2018 OCP Summit, attendees will find numerous embedded software projects being discussed in many of the tracks, along with a few new projects being launched this year!


Track 8: Hardware Management

In 2017, the HARDWARE MANAGEMENT project, working with DTMF and the Redfish management spec, began the diligent work to define a management profiles for OCP servers, storage appliances, network switchgear, power conversion devices and other remotely managed controllers. This project is working across the other projects to define management profiles for each of type of device. The end goal will achieve a standardized HW management interface for OCP devices, regardless of supplier. In the morning portion of the track, you can find out more about DTMF and their efforts from Broadcom’s Hemal Shah, HPE’s Jeff Autor and Intel’s John Leung. Jeff and John will also go into more detail about the Redfish profiles that they are working on in this group.

Saleforce.com has developed a BMC Mezzanine card and development platform that they will share with the audience and Tidal Scale Inc will discuss more flexibility in the data center with software-defined servers and their implementation of Redfish. The afternoon brings with it 2 case studies in HW Management - one from Facebook on multi-host NIC Management and one from Alibaba on PSU Management in the rack. Both will be informative and provide unique perspectives from industry leaders.

All in all, a full day of interactive conversation and loads of ideas for collaboration in this track. Plan your schedule accordingly.


Track 9: OpenBMC

Following a day 1 panel discussion on the journey to create open firmware, this track is dedicated to further discussion on open sourcing BMC firmware . IBM, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, and Google will each present their work streams on OpenBMC. Each company has invested quite alot of time and resource into their own implementation of BMC and now are working together to make OpenBMC available to everyone.


Track 10: Security and System Firmware

This afternoon session is must for everyone involved in system firmware.

Recognizing the opportunities to collaboration on security initiatives, Google and Microsoft are co-leading this new OCP project to define a means of providing a root of trust for the hardware and mutable firmware as these devices transit the chain of custody. Opportunities exist to share each companies learnings and for the entire community to collaborate to define an architecture to address current and new security threats. The recommendations and standards that will be defined and detailed by this project are expected to proliferate across the OCP Server, Storage, and Networking projects.

OCP has also launched the Open Systems Firmware project this year. Systems Firmware, aka BIOS, is the last frontier and most challenging piece of firmware yet to open source. Co-incidentally this project is also led by Microsoft and Google with people from AMD, Facebook, Intel, Horizon Computing, and Two Sigma already involved. Co-lead Ron Minnich (Google) brings his expertise on Linux to this project, and members have already demonstrated how the open sourced LinuxBoot can replace portions of the firmware image. The work ahead will be challenging, but this team has assembled the braintrust to meet that challenge.

Both project communities are well underway in defining charters, governance and work stream priorities and the entire OCP community is welcome to get involved and join their weekly meetings.