We are here at the Open Compute Summit 2017 and attending the keynotes. We are going to provide a summary of the major points you need to know. For those who are not aware, OCP was founded by Facebook as they started building their own hardware. The top dozen or so hyper-scalers such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google build their own hardware. Facebook started sharing its hardware designs through the Open Compute Project and others have joined them over the past few years.
Introducing the OCP Marketplace
One major question we get is where can you get OCP hardware if you are not necessarily a hyper-scaler. The new OCP Marketplace has been launched with dozens of products that you can buy. There are two main designations. OCP Accepted or OCP Inspired.
- OCP Accepted full design specs are published
- OCP Inspired design recognizes
Check out the marketplace and get ready to start getting your hands on OCP gear.
OCP also announced that there will be 19″ rack motherboard sleds available this year from vendors like QCT.
NetApp ONTAP Select on OCP
NetApp has unbundled ONTAP and made it available on OCP hardware.
This is a huge implication. NetApp traditionally has made high margins on hardware sales. Disclaimer, I did lead a multi-year consulting project team at NetApp a few years ago working on NetApp’s pricing and discounting systems. The unbundling of ONTAP and making it available for OCP hardware means one can use truly commodity hardware with an enterprise storage software system.
IBM Spectrum Scale on OCP
In addition to NetApp’s announcement, IBM Spectrum is coming to OCP. IBM will support three OCP platforms.
The message is clear, as the OCP ecosystem grows, we are going to see more of these types of announcements. Traditional enterprise players are going to face a choice of whether they will want to unbundle hardware and software.
Final Words
These are the main topics for the initial OCP Keynote. We will have more throughout the day especially as the member organizations give their keynotes. Get excited as there are major announcements happening today in the datacenter world.
