The fifth edition of the Open Compute Project Summit took place on January 28 and 29 in San Jose, California. Day one kicked off with Frank Frankovsky’s opening remarks. The Chairman and President of OCP Foundation presented the “Open Compute Project: 2014 and Beyond”, explaining to the audience what the event is going to focus on and what to expect from the following speakers.

Applying open source principles to the hardware space

Recounting the Open Compute Project history, Frankovsky began: “Back in 2007 we planted a few seeds: basically, we wanted to know what would happen if we applied open source principles to the hardware space.” He was pleased to anounce that today “there are more than 350 people registered.”

“We have more than 150 members, a cross of suppliers and customers, with some significant new members,” said Frankovsky. Of these new members, the OCP Foundation President singled out Microsoft, Panasonic, IBM, Box, Io, Bloomberg, Cumulus Network, and highlighted “the great progress in self-organized communities such as Japan.” The Japan chapter of open compute launched about a year ago and at the present moment there are over 50 members in Japan alone. Frankovsky admits that the “international expansion has been overwhelming,” and “the Foundation continues to grow.”

Development stages and new projects

• Workshops

“Over the last year we’ve attended multiple engineering workshops. We decided to do these big summits once a year, and host engineering workshops in between summits. This is where the project teams get together to do the real work of the foundation,” explained Frankovsky.

• Networking

“We launched a new project this past year. We thought it was awesome that open source has had such a nice, positive impact on software, data centers, servers and storage, and we have this lovely islands of open source technology – but what connects those islands together is still a proprietary black box. So we decided to give customers flexibility, choice and transparency. The same things that attracts people to open source software is what’s attracting us to open source hardware,” added Frankovsky.

The whole development process exploits the natural human curiosity: “How does it work? How would it work if I’d put it apart and put it back together the way I want to, instead of having a predefined appliance pushed on me.”

As a trend, Frankovsky noted that “the opening up of the network happened very quickly.” The network product was launched in a unique way, without a predefined notion of what it should be. About a year ago, the OCP Solution Provider ecosystem was introduced. The first solution providers were Hyve and Avnet, who were afterwards joined by five others: CTC, RackLive, Quanta, Amax and Penguin Computers.

“The industry is fundamentally transforming; these are companies that are building their businesses from the ground up, with open source communities in mind,” explained Frankovsky. “Instead of predefining a roadmap of products, and then try to find a product that fits that solution, these are businesses that are based on basically consultative selling.”

“I often get asked how broadly applicable will Open Compute be. It’s not just for the big guys,” reckoned Frankovsky, “and you’re going to hear customers’ adoption stories, from customers of all sizes and scales. The solution provider network plays a critical role in being able to deliver those benefits of a converged infrastructure without the proprietary b.s. that typically comes with it.”

Righting a wrong

“For some weird reason, we chose a bottleneck type of business model, where the communication between customers and the providers of technology is ‘facilitated’ by suppliers. This is not a non-blocking architecture model,” noted Frankovsky.

“What we have envisioned was a much more scalable business model to support open compute and the technology that customers want.”

As for the infrastructure that needed to be added, to make this possible, Frankovsky talked about a new technology licensing and about OCP certification.

Licensing and Certification

“The current license that we use within open compute is a very permissive one. When a technology supplier contributes their technology to the Foundation and somebody picks that up and transforms it, there’s no requirement today to give that derivative work back to the project,” Frankovsky explained. “However, the suppliers might be willing to give even more if they might get a return on that investment of intellectual property. So we added that, and we expect this measure to increase the velocity which has already been pretty great, and kick off that flywheel of derivative work and innovation that comes from it.

“The other core component, the OCP certification, is intended to certify that the custom work being pulled out from the open source building blocks is going to be right for the customer, high quality and supportable,” he said.

Historically, those who embraced open source have been more successful than those who fought it, noted Frankovsky. “We believe that these news businesses are going to be highly successful in delivering this velocity of open technology to get to end user.”

Collaboration

“All this structure is designed to help us collaborate, contribute more and consume things that we need, from an open compute perspective, to make sure that everyone continues to do the work or the project they need,” explained Frankovsky.

Not wanting to “steal the thunder” of the next presentations, Frank Frankovsky let them to emphasize on OCP Adoption, the new OCP Technologies and the new opportunities.

Frank Frankovsky mentioned the amazing efforts of Thomas Sohmers, the whiz kid who modified a trash can in order to build his rack, powering it with solar panels.

Looking into the future, Frankovsky predicted that “2014 is the year when you will see new methods and new hardware for cold storage (watch-out for the presentation from the Facebook team), more about disaggregated rack, more about alternative processor architectures and flexibility and choice in networking.”

“The future of the industry is wide open for us to invent. It’s no longer an industry that’s one-sided. It is customers and suppliers working together to invent what happens next, and that’s what excites me about open compute,” concluded Frank Frankovsky.