Open Compute Project showing strong momentum at U.S. Summit [feedly]

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Open Compute Project showing strong momentum at U.S. Summit
// MS Open Tech

The Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit 2015 this week in San Jose is highlighting key announcements from Microsoft, HP, Canonical and other members of the OCP vendor ecosystem, as outlined in a blog post today from Kushagra Vaid, Microsoft's General Manager of Cloud Server Engineering. These announcements demonstrate OCP's continued role in server industry innovation as well as the steady growth of the OCP community.

Microsoft recently contributed several innovative specifications to the Open Compute Project:

• Local Energized Storage (LES) is a specification for a new approach to managing power backup that reduces costs while improving power usage effectiveness (PUE) and performance predictability through the use of onboard lithium ion batteries instead of large and inefficient datacenter battery rooms.
• Switch Abstraction Layer (SAI) specifies a consistent API for common networking functions that enables application and protocol stack portability across hardware platforms. At the summit, Microsoft will join OCP contributors Dell, Mellanox and Broadcom to showcase SAI implementations on different platforms, demonstrating the topology used in Microsoft's production networks.
• Open CloudServer Solid State Drive v 2.0 (Cloud SSD) defines a high-performance PCI-Express based NVME drive with eight dedicated slots in the OCX v2 blade.

Also being announced at the OCP U.S. Summit is a new partnership between Microsoft and Canonical enabling Ubuntu to offer built-in support for the Open CloudServer (OCS) hardware configuration specification, which Microsoft contributed to OCP last year. As Kushagra Vaid explains in his blog post:

We're announcing a new partnership with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system. Canonical is supporting bare-metal provisioning on OCS hardware with its Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) deployment product. This support means Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE) operating systems, as well as application software on top, can be one-touch provisioned on OCS hardware. At the summit, we're demonstrating provisioning a multi-tier web architecture including content publishing and database to multiple nodes in an OCS chassis. This is the first showcase of automated deployment on OCP hardware, and displays the diverse mindshare OCS is capturing in the industry. "Taking Microsoft's leadership in OCP and combining that with our MaaS deployment product, we can significantly reduce the time and effort it takes to deploy a fully OCP-compliant solution," said John Zannos, Vice President of Cloud Alliances at Canonical. "It's collaborations like this that are driving true innovation on behalf of enterprise and network customers worldwide."

As another example of the growing influence of OCP in the industry, HP announced at the summit its new CloudLine server product line, which includes models based on the OCS specification. These new OCS servers will begin shipping later this year.

We're thrilled to see the continued impact of OCP, with Microsoft and other industry leaders sharing the fruits of their experience in running large-scale datacenters. Congratulations to all involved! We're looking forward to more great news out of the Open Compute Project in the year ahead.

Colleen Evans
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

 

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