At OCP Summit 2019, MiTAC showed off its solution to allow customers with existing 19″ rack infrastructure to utilize OCP designs. The MiTAC ESA V1 (enclosure subassembly) offers a solution for utilizing OCP designs today for organizations planning to utilize OCP racks tomorrow.
MiTAC ESA V1 Rail Kit
The MiTAC ESA V1 rail kit allows for two server sleds to be installed side-by-side. Cabling can be routed through the middle channel to make deployment easier.
The bottom of the chassis houses the power supplies. The MiTAC ESA V1 then distributes power to the OCP server nodes using a busbar at the rear. Measuring 33 inches deep, each ESA kit will fit most data centers. The ESA kit also has room for up to 8 compute sleds in the chassis.
MiTAC Crystal Lake OCP JBOF EST1250 Series
Storage in a two wide 19″ ESA kit versus a standard 21″ OCP rack can be challenging. To meet this challenge, the MiTAC Crystal Lake OCP JBOF EST1250 series can fit two per sled in the ESA.
The MiTAC Crystal Lake OCP JBOF utilizes a PCIe 3.0 expander (next generation PCIe 4.0) to provide PCIe connectivity to a number of NVMe SSDs. These SSDs can be either 16x U.2 SSDs or 32x M.2 form factor SSDs per JBOF. Since these are OCP nodes, these have out of band management via RJ-45 Ethernet as well. As one can see in the photo above, one pulls the node out of the rack to service the drives inside.
Final Words
The OCP 21″ rack works great for CSPs. On the other hand, the 19″ rack is ubiquitous and has been in use for decades across many industries. As OCP expands beyond sub 2% of IT spend (excluding CSPs), the standard will need a way to bridge the gap between the two rack standards. A potential solution is the MiTAC ESA V1 which the company thinks is a great way to start a migration path for an organization in an existing 19″ infrastructure.
