OCP Hardware: Revolution, Standard or Mainstream?
Despite the global COVID19 pandemic restrictions, spending on open computing is steadily increasing. In 2020, the figure reached $16 billion, and it is expected to reach $46 billion by 2025.
How it started
In 2009, Facebook realized it was growing exponentially and generated so much data that available hardware infrastructure couldn’t handle it anymore. Building more data centers that were just the same wasn’t a solution; they’d soon be at full capacity, and Facebook would need to create more and more. Well, unprecedented volumes of data required new unprecedented ways to build and manage IT infrastructure. That’s how the idea of a more efficient and less costly data center was born. A team of engineers succeeded at this task. They created a data center that was 38% more efficient to build and 24% cheaper to manage in comparison with a traditional hardware infrastructure.
So far, the idea of open source was primarily associated with software development. However, Facebook decided to extend open-source also to hardware and build a community that would constantly evolve, improve and add new ideas to the project. Thus, The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated in 2011 with a mission “to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center’s networking equipment, general-purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs.”
How it’s going
Companies can join the OCP community as members adding and sharing knowledge or clients purchasing the OCP hardware. At the moment, the community counts 284 members. A recent study reveals that despite the global COVID19 pandemic restrictions, spending on open computing is steadily increasing. In 2020, the figure reached $16 billion, and it is expected to reach $46 billion by 2025. Overall interest in OCP is expanding, especially in the emerging Asia Pacific and Africa regions, because of the constantly growing market demand for efficient technology solutions.
Early adopters of OCP were mostly large cloud providers, telco, and crypto companies. Now, retail, wholesale, and public sectors are increasingly interested in adopting OCP. The top reasons for choosing OCP are reducing energy consumption and low operation costs. Each industry relies on its specific reasons for choosing OCP. In the case of the financial sector, the reason is to follow the IT innovations and benefit from the services offered by cloud providers, keeping pace with competitors and customers’ demands. For telecom and healthcare, OCP hardware means freedom of choice that open source can deliver. Companies are not tied to a specific vendor. It becomes a crucial point while participating in government tenders.
Difference matters
First of all, traditional and OCP servers differ visually; both have the same components but different structures and arrangements. OCP racks are narrower. For optimized cooling, OCP servers are designed with bigger heatsinks than in traditional servers, and the diameter of the fans on the back of the server is twice larger than on traditional servers.
The installation of all OCP server components (RAM, storage) does not require any tool, reducing installation and maintenance time.
Capacity changing and scaling individual elements is effortless thanks to the modular and assembly-free design. The advantage of buying open-source hardware is that you can avoid vendor lock-in situations due to standardized, interchangeable hardware and its components.
Enjoy the Benefits…
Increased Performance
A whole community day by day working on improving a product and generously sharing the knowledge became a significant benefit of open source. It is a constant process of adding new features, optimizing design, improving functionality, etc. The excellent availability of different options and features is a real advantage of OCP. Once you realize how OCP works, you can see how much flexibility and performance it offers, satisfying the particular requirements for your IT infrastructure. Besides, OCP is not only about hardware but software as well. Many OCP projects regard software development, for example, software for data center management.
Lower Costs
No vendor lock-in situations allow you to deal with as many hardware suppliers at once as you like or choose the one with the best price. You can select the hardware that fits your use case explicitly. Traditionally, IT products are not individually optimized for the customers’ purposes. Thus, traditional hardware has features or components that could be unnecessary for you. So you end up paying for something that you won’t be using in the best case, or you’ll have to spend additional time and workforce to learn how to manage unnecessary components. Choosing an OCP hardware that suits your needs will cost you less manpower, time, and money.
Minimized Energy Consumption
Back in the days when OCP was initiated, one of the primary goals driven by financial benefits was to lower energy consumption. Today, instead, consuming less energy is far more than just saving costs. Corporate reputation includes ESG and everyday conscious decisions to care about the environment. It’s a brand value that shows the company’s priorities and ways to develop the business focusing on the planet and consumers’ interests.
…And Face the Challenges
If you choose to differentiate yourself from the competitors with OCP hardware, beware there might be a few challenges along the way. As revealed by a study mentioned above, the most recent one is the shortage of qualified staff. At the moment, it stands as a barrier to growth due to pandemics and supply chain issues.
Another concern is the integration of OCP hardware with a company’s current software choice. A hardware vendor might not solve the problem in this case, and you’ll need to search for qualified technical staff.
Access to the hardware has been an issue since the starting of OCP. Most of the vendors focused on hyper scalers neglecting small-scale buyers. Thus, a supply chain and support infrastructure are still missing for smaller companies interested in OCP. The situation has improved since then but is not completely solved. A solution seems to come from a “circular economy” consisting of decommissioning and reselling used equipment from hyperscale data centers to smaller companies.
Also, not all the data centers are ready to welcome OCP hardware. The data center architecture must meet specific requirements to store open compute servers physically.
FishOS: OCP approved
Together with its partners, Sardina Systems has developed and validated a fully integrated cloud solution based on OpenStack and Kubernetes to build highly scalable and efficient enterprise clouds on revolutionary IT infrastructure designed by OCP. The open-source approach used by OCP results in many hardware solutions that successfully fit specific use cases and significantly optimize data center infrastructure costs, including energy consumption and hardware utilization rate.
With their strong expertise in open-source hardware implementation, our European partners help enterprises quickly integrate and run open compute infrastructure.
Vesper Technologies is a leading hardware vendor and an IT systems integrator focused on delivering OCP servers, network, and storage solutions. Vesper and Sardina have created and validated a fully integrated solution on OpenStack and Kubernetes, with the option to add Ceph storage, allowing customers to build highly scalable and efficient clouds managed by FishOS to handle the most demanding of workloads at a highly competitive TCO. The joint solution can be delivered globally, complemented with a choice of management and support services ranging from DIY to complete SaaS.
Sardina Systems and Circle B partnership offer a range of solutions for complex business requirements at a rack-scale level. With Circle B, Sardina provides a perfect complete IT solution for data centers and their customers, focusing on sustainability goals, responsible digital transformation, and TCO savings.
To know more and experience the benefit of the most innovative hardware and software solutions, contact Sardina Systems at info@sardinasystems.com
Tags: partnership, fishos, cloud computing, OCP, cloud infrastructure
