“The data deluge needs to be addressed,”began his presentation William Mapp, the Executive VP of Servergy. Present on the Open Compute Project Summit stage in San Jose to speak about “Enabling the pace of information,” Mapp couldn’t help but quote Louis L’Amour: “Over time information will grow in volume and variety – and hopefully value.”

It’s an I/O world

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IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 ZB by 2020, an amount that exceeds previous forecasts by 14 percent. Mapp points out: “We normally heard the three V’s around Big Data – Volume, Variety and Velocity – but there’s a fourth V that’s really driving all of this globally: Value.”

The value of information is our drive to gain more information about our lives and the way we live, and why we do what we do. Looking at the costs of our search for knowledge and the value of that information, we need to really look at how we fundamentally go and support that search in the future.

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• Power, cooling, space

Regarding the cost of information, Mapp commented that right now the data centers consume about 10 percent of the world’s energy globally. Over two days, the average data center can use as much as an Olympic-size swimming pool of water just for cooling. That has a tremendous impact, globally, warns Mapp, especially that there are regions experiencing severe drought issues. There’s also around 400m sq feet of data centers globally, and growing rapidly. At the moment, the data center real estate is one of the highest growing forms of real estate investment, globally. People want to know how they can get a better return on their investment.

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• The cascade effect

Around one watt saved at the server saves close to three watts at the data center level, noted Mapp.

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• Approach to innovation

There’s a couple of ways people are approaching innovation, trying to solve some of these issues early-on in the architecture and design of these platforms. After investing millions of dollars in equipment, most people are trying to get a better ROI out of the investments they made, instead of designing a new architecture. “At Servergy, our focus is different than throwing an architecture at an issue,” boasted Mapp. “Being solution-minded, we’re interested in ‘What is the problem you are trying to solve’.”

If we are looking at all the types of workloads in the data center, they are all very vast, having huge implications on architectures.  Even Hadoop as a workload is anything but one-size-fits-all; we need to take a holistic approach and figure out what’s going to get the best overall performance per watt and the best ROI on the investment.

There is a wide variety of tools and resources out there, but Mapp advised to focus on the solution.

One of the things we see around this growth of information and the stats around the ZB age, big data, cloud computing, it is basically focusing on an I/O intensive world. The SOCs of the future are really going to be focused on communication, predicted Mapp.

If we look at other ways people are trying to gain density optimized performance in open platforms, we’re very excited about what Facebook is doing with Group Hug.

As for Servergy’s next gen density optimized open platforms, Mapp listed the following characteristics:

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• Support ARM, MIPS, Power, X86
• 2 x PCiE Gen 3 x 16 per card
• Support more SERDES lanes
• Support scale-out/scale-up
• Support ECC RAM
• Work with Group Hug servers
• Works out of the chassis

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Wrapping up his presentation with the Open Compute community in mind, William Mapp chose to close with another quote, this time around for the most recognized theoretician of evolution, Charles Darwin himself: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

“It’s a very exciting time for collaboration,” said Mapp. “We have the tools, the resources and the structure.” Formation is the key to effective collaboration.

You can watch the entire segment below: