In The Arena by TechArena - Accelerating European Data Center Buildout with OCP’s Raul Alvarez

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with OCP’s Raul Alvarez on his new charter accelerating growth of the data center market in Europe as well as his ongoing work in immersion cooling technologies from OCP Lisbon 2024.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein and we're coming to you from OCP Lisbon. I'm so excited to be joined by Raul Alvarez from OCP. Welcome to the program, Raul. Thank you. So Raul, you haven't been on the show before. Why don't you go ahead and just introduce yourself and your role at OCP? So I'm Raul. I'm working right now on a couple of different areas in OCP as a volunteer. I'm working with immersion cooling challenges, the cooling environment, and at the same time, I'm working for the New York Community effort and project, co-leading this with my colleague, Jerome Brooks, and a set of regional leads to move the OCP adoption forward in New York.

That's a huge challenge and opportunity. Let's start with cooling. Tell me about the immersion cooling challenges and what they are and how this helps propel the industry. So the fundamental work that we're doing there is we are trying to identify the technology and adoption challenges for immersion cooling. You can actually understand that this is actually a very innovative, revolutionary way of cooling devices and IT equipment that goes a little bit farther than what normal data center environment might be.

So what we are doing there is trying to identify those differences, those challenges in adoption for this kind of technology and how to solve those for actually help remove breach for the adoption of this kind of technology. And when you are at OCP Lisbon, I know that you were delivering a session here on immersion cooling. What did you notice about the state of industry conversation on this topic? And was there anything interesting that you saw here this week? Well, actually, this is a talk that we're going to give right now.

We had one yesterday, the Liquid Cooling Bazaar. We had a great representation and a great, let's say, forum with all of my colleagues on the immersion cooling both stream and the cooling environment as well. Right now, we're actually seeing that the immersion cooling market is maturing more and more.

There's actually a huge drive, actually being driven by density with new technologies and propositions like AI and ML that actually makes this kind of cooling

environment a very attractive position. So this is actually, let's say, this is driving this adoption or the curiosity from the industry about adopting this. And actually, this is driving the rest of the industry partners to open those discussions, to be more open about this kind of technology.

So we are seeing developments from the media starting to actually invest into this technology, hiring people, creating labs, know more about this. So it's not going to be on the direct ship cooling, which is actually very prevalent in the industry. We are actually looking into the rest of what the cooling environments are. Now let's shift for a second and say that the new assignment on engaging the European community is a pretty large opportunity.

Where are we with OCP adoption in Europe today? What do you think has driven the current state? What needs to change? So when you think about OCP and when you think about who are actually the major adopters of OCP worldwide, you can still understand that this is actually going for hyperscalers like Google. Also because OCP and most of the, let's say, engineering body of knowledge and work for O vehicles, mainly from those environments. We have actually affirmed that the hyperscale industry is actually very well off in terms of adoption in Europe.

But if you, let's say, if you want to take another good look at the industry and actually disregard that, because this is already done, and take a good look at the standard data center, enterprise data center industry. This is where the challenge and adoption is.

And this is where we are actually working with local OCP partners in every country. We are actually enabling those regional leads that are actually taking care of regions in Europe to work with those OCP partners to grow that ecosystem, which is already there, but it's actually in its

inception, you can say. And actually to take a good look at what comes before the hyperscale in terms of let's spell, volume. So it's all about helping, taking the most of what the industry and OCP and the community has already developed and researched and demonstrated with large-scale OCP requirements

and taking a step back for the adoption, for the case of OCP Technologies and the standard that it's using. What's unique about the European market in terms of that opportunity? Well, the first thing that's actually unique about the European market is that there's not only one European market. It's all about different regions inside Europe. It's about different countries, different cultures, different languages. So it's all about how we solve with proper metrics and proper measurements, how we solve that myriad of small markets,

how we, let's say, cater to those markets and how we actually help grow also being those. What is the goal for the effort in 2024? What does success look like? Well, actually, success is actually very, very interesting because the set of metrics that we set out to achieve, they are kind of very varied.

So we don't have a set of business or market metrics by themselves that are actually reflecting the adoption of OCP. Well, we are actually having some, let's say, soft metrics in terms of OCP adoption. What we're actually looking very, very closely is actually the number of new members joining OCP, the number of new contributions regarding OCP. But we are working with market analytics, analytics companies like IDC to actually coach the adoption of False Epic. And we're trying to figure out how we can actually measure the number of units sold, number of new deployments

that are not at hyperscale. Right. And what we're trying to achieve as well is that with this discussion with OCP partners, which in the end, they are actually selling those social solutions, we expect to uncover

how many units are they selling to the European market and then throw a picture with all of that data. That's fantastic. When you talk about the adoption of technology outside the hyperscale data centers.

Is there any particular area of OCP configurations that you see early traction of? Well, in that sense, of course, we're talking about data center. We are talking about open RACs. The beauty of open RAC and the open RAC architecture and the data center guidelines for OCP is that they create a more flexible environment and not only that, but they create a more sustainable and efficient

data center environment. So if you take a good look at OCP equipment and the design of the open blank, we are talking about ripping out the efficiencies that the design

for scale are actually providing and translating those efficiencies to a lower scale but taking advantage of all of that. So if you're actually discussing about more sustainable corruptions in terms of server design, OCP has it. Sustainability around the rack as well. Around power efficiencies on power conversions, we already have it with OCP.

So there's a set of benefits that the industry can benefit from the design for scale that OCP has already made up. And then there's another very interesting development that goes out of the data center industry, which is actually telecommunications with the Open RAN initiative and EventStar initiative actually coming from NERA as well that are actually poised to enable the 5G and edge solutions for based on open... Yeah, I'm really excited about that initiative in particular.

Raul, it was really interesting talking to you. I can't wait... Thanks for having me. Yeah, I can't wait to hear more about what you do with this new charter. We'd love to have you back on the show. Where can folks find out more about what's going on with OCP, get involved in the organization, and reach out to you? You can, of course, visit the OCP webpage.

There's actually the Enea Community Project section there. There you will find, and actually all of the content is completely open. There you will find the mailing list. You will find the wiki with all of the recordings that we do monthly. The second Thursday of the week. No, second Tuesday of the week.

Sorry about that. And yeah, you can actually join the mailing list, join the poll posts, reach out to me and all of the rest of the, of the regional leads and start distancing

and start engaging. Well, thank you so much for being on, Sibed. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

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