Google And Telcos Join Facebook, Microsoft And Rackspace To Standardize Data Center Equipment

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is at a pivotal point in OCP’s mission is to standardize server, storage and data center hardware designs to increase economies of scale. OCP’s challenge is defining specifications intended for large scale manufacturing when not all data center companies are participating in OCP. Microsoft and Facebook are members, and Google started participating in a limited fashion last week, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) and many Chinese companies, such as Alibaba , Baidu and Tencent, are not members. Many of these large public cloud service providers define their own systems; they build their own hardware or order it from leading ODMs with some feature customization.

While Facebook has grown big enough to order custom hardware, it founded OCP when it was smaller and looking to accelerate new data center concepts and achieve larger economies of scale. As the founding member, Facebook opened its specifications to a wider community.

While OCP may no longer drive significantly better economies of scale for Facebook, OCP makes sense for smaller data center service providers like Rackspace, also a founding OCP member and a large managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas. Rackspace is big, but not in the same order of magnitude as Facebook, Microsoft, and the other web giants. If successful, OCP will create a hardware ecosystem that gives these smaller data center service providers some of the economies of scale enjoyed by the large public clouds.

Unfortunately, OCPs does not have one cohesive set of hardware standards that will help smaller service providers leverage Facebook’s economies of scale. They have many, such as the two physical rack sizes:

• OCP Open Rack v2 has 19-inch rack width that surpasses the EIA 19-inch rack spec, but Open Rack does not yet have a server blade or sled chassis spec. It does have a few server board designs.
• Open CloudServer v2.1 uses a 21-inch rack width. Its blade spec includes 1U chassis “trays”, and 1U server blades and boards. Microsoft donated Open CloudServer to OCP two years ago.

[More detail on the OCP specifications and value proposition are available here.]

In addition to these sizes, last week Google took the first step toward creating another new rack form factor by donating a new 48V rack with dimensions that appear to shallower (front to back) than OCP’s current specs and wider.

In addition, OCP announced a new project that is likely to a new rack dimension – The Telco Project. The OCP Telco Project is intended to bring telco requirement system requirements into the OCP community and to bring economies of scale to telco data centers through OCP standardization.

Public & private cloud service providers using other OCP rack widths will be disappointed if telcos coopt OCP mission

The OCP Telco Project is related to the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) because many members participate in both projects.  And like OCP, TIP is sponsored by Facebook. TIP’s goal is to help telcos develop new network infrastructure technologies for access, backhaul, core and management.

Telcos have telephony equipment rack width specifications for 150mm (5.9-inch), 300mm (11.8-inch), 600mm (23.6-inch, precisely, sometimes referred to as 23-inch) and 900mm (35.4-inch) wide racks.

Also announced last week were two levels of OCP logo certification for which OCP will grant the rights to use these phrases and the related OCP logos:

• OCP Accepted – a product must meet applicable OCP specifications and be submitted for Incubation Committee (IC) and OCP Foundation staff approval. This language is fairly strong.
• OCP Inspired – also must be submitted for IC and OCP Foundation staff approval. However, in the case approval is not granted, these products may use this designation if the following are demonstrated:

1. Adherence to OCP principals, as demonstrated by providing detailed specifications and manufacturing evidence to the approval process.
2. Association with IT compute, network and/or storage functions.
3. Investment in building a working product, even if only an engineering sample or prototype – but it must be available for purchase by any OCP member within 120 days (roughly four months) of receiving OCP Inspired certification.

A third level, “OCP Certified” has been proposed, but is not yet defined. Certification and interoperability testing will present another challenge to OCP.

There are many types of certification programs, and all of them will require more substantial funding for the OCP organization plus higher levels of effort and investment from vendor members seeking certification. While these new logo certifications are a step in the right direction, proliferation of rack form factors is the enemy of interoperability and economies of scale.

The best chance for enforceable OCP-Certified specifications to take hold will be through the newly formed OCP Telco Project. Telecommunications service providers have considerable scale and they actively seek to create a heterogeneous standards-driven server supplier base. However, public and private data center service providers using other OCP rack widths could be very disappointed if telcos divert the direction and standards of OCP.

OCP has the potential to define standards for the benefit of the entire data center ecosystem. However, diverging standards, insufficient resources and lack of agreement on how to certify adherence to these standards remain key challenges for OCP. These challenges will ultimately determine the direction of not only OCP, but of the entire cloud market.

-- Disclaimer: The author and members of the TIRIAS Research staff do not hold equity positions in any of the companies mentioned. TIRIAS Research tracks and consults for companies along the path of data from IoT sensors to data center analytics, including semiconductor and system manufacturers.

-- Corrected "OEMs" in first paragraph to read "ODMs" on 3/21/2016.