Day two of Open Compute Summit V debuted with Ian Drew, Chief Marketing Officer with ARM, who promised he wouldn’t talk at all about marketing in his presentation.

Besides marketing, Drew is also responsible for servers being developed and the community engagement that goes around that, so he took the time to bring the audience up to speed with what ARM is doing at the moment.

“The next five years are going to be a revolution in the data center,” anticipates Drew.
“This is going to be done not by monolithic structures, but by collaboration, by working together on innovation and on other cool and unique things.”

As an engineer, Drew started designing CPUs for a living, so he had to get his head around numbers in rather creative ways. Understanding the data and mobile explosion and putting that into certain numbers was a bit of a challenge. Looking at what really drives this current data explosion, Drew’s team noticed that mobile phones are very unique drivers towards this movement.

Likening them to the grains of the sand, Drew mentioned there’s currently some 7.5 exabytes of data, with the very real possibility in next three years to see more exabytes per month coming from mobiles than individual grains of sand exists on this planet.

The ARM CMO is prophesying a huge amount of data that’s going to come through in the future: “Interestingly, mobile data is not the only thing that’s going through a data center. We are seeing a huge revolution of data coming from set-up boxes, DTVs, from all those cat videos across the internet, from the half of billion of wearable medical devices, from the internet of things and from the cars and everything connected,” notes Drew.

Predictions

Some say that over 60 percent of the cars that are going to be shipped in the near future will be Wi-Fi connected, notes Drew. “All this data is coming,” he warns, “and it’s not going to go through standard devices like laptops (which process it locally), but to backend servers and data centers and we’re going to see new structures.”

We’re also seeing a huge growth in the Internet of Things market. The growth of all those connected devices is going to be massive. Everything is going to be connected wirelessly and to a server farm somewhere. “We need to figure out how to connect them together,” explains Drew.

Another change that Ian Drew foresees is the way that apps are structured. “The first billion apps were games and news apps. In the future apps are going to be connected seamlessly to the internet and you won’t even know they are connected. You’ll just see a live application in front of you. How all this is going to be structured needs to be figured out in this data center revolution.”

• The second thing that needs to come together is standards.

Drew exemplified reminding us all about the typewriter. “The QWERTY keyboard has been around for about 150 years, and it was designed so that keys didn’t stick,” he explained. Vowels were not placed next to each-other, to eliminate the chance of being pressed  together and becoming stuck.

“If you look at your keyboard now, on your touchscreens, it displays the same QWERTY layout. That has driven a standard that everybody knows and can use. The data center will be driven by a standard as well,” believes Drew.

“We’re going to see a lot more efficiency driven through the data center, and there’s going to be a few things that will change:

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• We’ve seen the networking and the enterprise becoming a lot closer to the datacenters. Eventually, we’ll see them merging.
• We’ll see monolithic structures breaking down as the cloud becomes real.
• Workload optimization will mean having the right size and the right type of processing elements for the job that’s required.
• The total costs of ownership is going to be driven by how you handle the workload.

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Innovation through partnership

Some three years ago Frank Frankovsky said something that stuck with Drew: “End gratuitous differentiation” – what he really meant, thinks Drew, was “don’t differentiate for differentiation’s type; work as a total ecosystem, making sure that if you’re adding value and differentiating, the whole ecosystem can make use of that.”

“The innovation comes from partnership,” stated Drew.

How do you drive innovation and keep standards?

“How do you have cross-platform portability and how do you simplify some of the manageability? For ARM and its ecosystem partners solving this puzzle was a necessity to go do, in order to drive that next five-year vision.”

“I’m really pleased to announce that now it’s available to download, from the ARM site, something that we’ve catchily named ‘Server Base System Architecture Specification’ (SBSA).”

“This was put in place so that we could standardize,” said Drew. “It’s a hardware spec for OS and firmware developers, written by hardware guys and software guys together.”

Scalability by collaboration

Drew wrapped up his presentation by highlighting three trends he noticed in the industry:

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• the Big Data revolution is coming – the new business model is to get ready for that
• Innovation is important for scalability, and the business model around that is not
• proprietary, but working together. The 21st Century business model is scalability by collaboration.
• SBSA accelerates deployment on ARM, taking away the roadblocks