The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an organization that shares designs of
data center products and best practices among companies, including
ARM
In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...
,
Meta,
IBM,
Wiwynn,
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
,
Nokia
Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...
,
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
,
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
,
Seagate Technology,
Dell,
Rackspace
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...
,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States.
HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the ...
,
NVIDIA
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
,
Cisco
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
,
Goldman Sachs,
Fidelity
Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of ''fealty''. Both derive from the Latin word ''fidēlis'', meaning "faithful or loyal". In the City of London fin ...
,
Lenovo and
Alibaba Group.
Project structure
The Open Compute Project Foundation is a
501(c)(6) non-profit incorporated in the state of Delaware. Rocky Bullock serves as the Foundation's CEO and has a seat on the board of directors. As of July 2020, there are 7 members who serve on the board of directors which is made up of one individual member and six organizational members. Mark Roenigk (
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
) is the Foundation's president and chairman.
Andy Bechtolsheim is the individual member. In addition to Mark Roenigk who represents
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
, other organizations on the Open Compute board of directors include
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
(Rebecca Weekly),
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
(Kushagra Vaid),
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
(Partha Ranganathan), and
Rackspace
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...
(Jim Hawkins).
A current list of members can be found on th
opencompute.orgwebsite.
History
The Open Compute Project began in Facebook as an internal project in 2009 called "Project Freedom". The hardware designs and engineering team were led by Amir Michael (Manager, Hardware Design) and sponsored by Jonathan Heiliger (VP, Technical Operations) and Frank Frankovsky (Director, Hardware Design and Infrastructure). The three would later open source the designs of Project Freedom and co-found the Open Compute Project. The project was announced at a press event at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto on April 7th 2011.
OCP projects
The Open Compute Project Foundation maintains a number of OCP projects, such as:
Server designs
Two years after Open Compute Project had started, with regards to a more modular server design, it was admitted that "the new design is still a long way from live data centers". However, some aspects published were used in Facebook's Prineville data center to improve energy efficiency, as measured by the
power usage effectiveness Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a ratio that describes how efficiently a computer data center uses energy; specifically, how much energy is used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead that supports the equipment).
...
index defined by
The Green Grid
The Green Grid is a nonprofit, industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers.
At one time it had more than 175 ...
.
[ ]
video archive
Efforts to advance server compute node designs included one for
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
processors and one for
AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...
processors. In 2013,
Calxeda
Calxeda (previously known as Smooth-Stone) was a company that aimed to provide computers based on the ARM architecture for server computers. It operated from 2008 through 2013.
In March 2011 Calxeda announced a 480-core server in development, c ...
contributed a design with
ARM architecture processors. Since then, several generations of OCP server designs have been deployed: Wildcat (Intel), Spitfire (AMD), Windmill (Intel E5-2600), Watermark (AMD), Winterfell (Intel E5-2600 v2) and Leopard (Intel E5-2600 v3)
Data storage
Open Vault storage building blocks offer high disk densities, with 30 drives in a 2U
Open Rack chassis designed for easy
disk drive
Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
replacement. The 3.5 inch disks are stored in two drawers, five across and three deep in each drawer, with connections via
serial attached SCSI. This storage is also called Knox, and there is also a cold storage variant where idle disks power down to reduce energy consumption. Another design concept was contributed by Hyve Solutions, a division of
Synnex
Synnex was an American multinational corporation that provides information technology (IT) services to businesses. It merged with competitor Tech Data to form TD Synnex. It was founded in 1980 by Robert T. Huang and based in Fremont, Cali ...
in 2012. At the OCP Summit 2016 Facebook together with Taiwanese ODM Wistron's spin-off Wiwynn introduced Lightning, a flexible NVMe JBOF (just a bunch of flash), based on the existing Open Vault (Knox) design.
Rack designs
The designs for a mechanical mounting system have been published, so that open racks have the same outside width (600 mm) and depth as standard
19-inch rack
A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple electronic equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide. The 19 inch dimension includes the edges or "ears" that protrude from each side of the equ ...
s, but are designed to mount wider chassis with a 537 mm width (21 inches). This allows more equipment to fit in the same volume and improves air flow. Compute chassis sizes are defined in multiples of an
OpenU, which is 48 mm, slightly taller than the typical 44mm
rack unit.
Energy efficient data centers
The OCP has published data center designs for energy efficiency. These include power distribution at 277 VAC, which eliminates one transformer stage in typical data centers, a single voltage (12.5 VDC) power supply designed to work with 277 VAC input, and 48 VDC battery backup.
Open networking switches
On May 8, 2013, an effort to define an open
network switch
A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device.
A netw ...
was announced. The plan was to allow Facebook to load its own
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
software onto the switch. Press reports predicted that more expensive and higher-performance switches would continue to be popular, while less expensive products treated more like a
commodity (using the
buzzword "top-of-rack") might adopt the proposal.
The first attempt at an open networking switch by Facebook was designed together with Taiwanese ODM
Accton using
Broadcom
Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...
Trident II chip and is called Wedge, the Linux OS that it runs is called FBOSS. Later switch contributions include "6-pack" and Wedge-100, based on Broadcom Tomahawk chips. Similar switch hardware designs have been contributed by:
Edgecore Networks Corporation (Accton spin-off), Mellanox Technologies, Interface Masters Technologies, Agema Systems. Capable of running
Open Network Install Environment (ONIE)-compatible
network operating system
A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall.
Historically operating systems with networking capabilities were described as network operating systems, because they al ...
s such as
Cumulus Linux, Switch Light OS by Big Switch Networks, or PICOS by
Pica8
Pica8, Inc. is a computer networking company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Pica8 is a vendor of open-standards-based operating systems on white box network switches delivering software-defined networking (SDN) solutions fo ...
. A similar project for a custom switch for the
Google platform had been rumored, and evolved to use the
OpenFlow protocol.
Servers
Sub-project for
Mezzanine (
NIC) OCP NIC 3.0 specification 1v00 was released in late 2019 establishing 3 form factors: SFF, TSFF, and LFF .
Litigation
In March, 2015, BladeRoom Group Limited and Bripco (UK) Limited sued Facebook, Emerson Electric Co. and others alleging that Facebook has disclosed BladeRoom and Bripco's trade secrets for prefabricated data centers in the Open Compute Project. Facebook petitioned for the lawsuit to be dismissed, but this was rejected in 2017. A confidential mid-trial settlement was agreed in April 2018.
See also
*
Novena (computing platform)
Novena is an open-source computing hardware project designed by Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Sean "Xobs" Cross. The initial design of Novena started in 2012. It was developed by Sutajio Ko-usagi Pte. Ltd. and funded by a crowdfunding campaign which ...
*
OpenBMC
*
Open-source computing hardware
*
OpenPOWER Foundation
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM is opening up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as proc ...
*
Telecom Infra Project –
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
sister project focusing on
Optical
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...
broadband networks and open
cellular networks
A cellular network or mobile network is a communication network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless. The network is distributed over land areas called "cells", each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver (typically thre ...
References
External links
*
* Data Centers
*
Prineville Data Center*
Forest City Data Center*
Altoona Data Center*
Luleå Data Center (Sweden)*
Fort Worth Data Center*
Clonee Data Center (Ireland)* Videos
** , Hot Chips 23, 2011 2.5 Hour Tutorial
** , Facebook V1 Open Compute Server
**
** , Open Compute starts at 5:40
* Case Studies
*
Game publisher builds a cost-efficient, scalable data center and reduces operational complexities with OCP.
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