Ready for Business: OCP Summit 2018 - Insights from Matt St. Peter
The annual OCP (Open Compute Project) Summit, held recently in San Jose, continues to grow each year. The convention center was packed with industry experts from around the world with a lot of discussion focused on where OCP currently is and how the community can move it forward. With the theme “Ready for Business,” OCP and its members were committed to showcasing that OCP-based architectures are ready for deployment.
Just a Hardware Group?
At this point, OCP is a well-defined open hardware foundation. So a new major topic was how to standardize on a coherent software structure that runs on the hardware. During my presentation, I shared how the current open software ecosystem can be very difficult to navigate. Even though the same view could also apply to common rack-mount-servers, potential customers can have more decisions to make with OCP since the open system is customer-defined with customer-selected software stacks. There’s also currently a missed opportunity on the management software. The good news for Radisys is that our story resonates well with potential customers who are looking to deploy complete integrated open hardware and software solutions.
Increase the Focus on Telecom
The OCP Foundation is keen on enlarging its role in telecoms and other data center markets that branch out from the Facebook data center model. During the workshop, we highlighted the Radisys contributed OCP-ACCEPTED™ CG-OpenRack-19 specification, which is the only OCP standard that fits this growing need.
To educate attendees about the growing role of OCP for telco and the associated ecosystem, I presented material on “Building the Foundation: How to Deploy CORD Architectures with OCP-based Hardware.” During this presentation, I was able to share real numbers around how many racks and sleds are available for production, how many have shipped and are carrying traffic, and how many vendors are in production. OCP has posted a video of my presentation that you can watch here or you can download the slides here.
Radisys’ commitment and history within OCP, as a member of the community and contributor of the CG-OpenRack-19 specification, and our services related to system architecture, integration, bring-up, and support make us the ideal partner in ensuring our customers disrupt and win in this evolving telecom environment. We’ll definitely be back to the OCP Summit next year and will be eager to contribute to updates on OCP’s “readiness for business” and commercial deployments.
You can get more information on Radisys’ work within OCP here, and you can learn more about the Open Radisys mission here.