Continuing the tech talks on the stage of the Open Compute Summit V in San Jose, California, Eric Hooper (Director of Cloud Service Provider Optimization with Intel) and Grant Richard (Technology Fellow and Managing Director at Goldman Sachs) delivered a presentation called “Designing the Datacenter of the Future”.

As a founding member of the OCP community, Intel wanted to present its ongoing projects and to talk about the way it’s delivering its contribution.

“Intel is working in the development of the next generation technologies and then trying to drive adoption across the OCP community,” said Hooper. “We are so excited about the Intel Rack scale architecture and we focus on our development activities.”

Evolving needs of scale-out infrastructure

“Whether it is public or private, we need scalable, flexible and efficient infrastructure that supports resource pools which deliver the services demanded by a wider range of workloads,” explained Hooper. “In the compute space, there’s a wide need for compute nodes. There’s also a need for standard-based network equipment that can be deployed in a wide range of topologies, with increasing bandwidth and decreasing latencies. The workloads demand new storage and memory models, of pooled and shared resources that meet the needs of these workloads.”

Finally, Hooper highlighted another necessity: the need to manage this infrastructure seamlessly, providing a flexible service.

Helping the industry progress towards that end-state

• On the storage side, Intel is working with a number of industry partners to deliver the standard JBOD systems and the emerging cold storage systems.
• On the networking side, they work with the community to develop a 10GIG, 40GIG bare-metal top of the rack switch specification that defined how they can see some lower-cost, simpler network hardware emerge.
• Intel is now working on its third generation OCP boards.

Eric Hooper presented the audience with the next generation compute module.

“This is based on the Intel next generation Zion platform. A functional version can be seen over in the Intel’s booth,” he announced.

According to Hooper, Intel’s portfolio is growing, spanning a breadth of solutions that can meet that increasing computing needs.

“By the end of the year we’ll have a handful of boards added to this portfolio, available in the ecosystem, to meet the needs of the OCP community members,” he stated.

Further stating the progress achieved by Intel since the last summit, Hooper continued: “At last year’s OCP summit we showed some early samples of the silicon photonics cables and connectors. We talked about what the technology was capable of and we released a design guide describing how you might incorporate optics into rack designs. In the past year we’ve made lots of progress with the MXC connector – the low cost multi fiber connector that is built specifically for the data center reliability. This is also functioning in our booth.”

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Making the Open Compute vision a reality

“Like everybody else, we’ve been working with a lot of partners both in the supply side and the end-user side,” stated Hooper, who went on to introduce on stage his guest.

Grant Richard, Managing Director/Technology Fellow at Goldman Sachs, “an advocate for OCP from the early beginnings”, joined Hooper on stage to talk about OCP and its adoption.

Richard started by presenting the Goldman Sachs technology at a glance: 68 data centers, 34 Megawatts available, 10,000 network devices, 500,000 Compute cores, 28 PB storage and quite an elaborate IT department of 8,000 people (engineers & technologists).

The most important steps taken by Goldman Sachs in partnering with OCP are detailed in a three-year span, from 2011 onwards:

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• GS attends OCP formation and issues press statement supporting
• GS is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Facebook Open Compute Foundation
• Partners for formation of Hardware Management Track
• Works with financial and other members on 19” Intel & AMD form factor contributions
• Assists with of C&I Track creation
• Future: Deploy OCP form factors in production

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As for the question of “How does GS leverage OCP?”, there’s a simple requirement: “A single scale out 19” motherboard (from Intel – Decathlete) for remote desktop, risk calculation, storage and cloud for traditional cabinets.

The technical engagement of Goldman Sachs Compute Engineering members is quite impressive. They materially contributed to:

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• Technical specifications
• Review with CPU manufacturers detail designs
• Testing of BIOS and other firmware for functionality and performance

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Watch the entire segment below: