In The Arena by TechArena - OpenCompute Project’s Skyrocketing Contributions Shaping the Future from Edge to Cloud

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

TechArena Host Allyson Klein chats with Open Compute Foundation leaders Michael Schill and Steve Helvie about the organization’s rising contributions and what it means for broad adoption of open hardware configurations from edge to cloud.

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 Allison Klein, and we're coming to you from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague. I'm joined by OCP representatives Michael Schill and Steve Thelby. Michael and Steve, welcome to the program. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourselves? Thanks, Allison. Really glad to be on. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Schill. I'm the QE Director for OCP.

Allison, my name is Steve Elvey, and I'm the VP of Emerging Markets for OCP. So, OCP Prague, it's so great to be back. I feel like we're maybe at the first post-pandemic events for OCP, and the energy is amazing. I was in the queue for the morning, and the energy is amazing. It was in the key of all morning and the sessions were fantastic. This, I think, really makes me question where are we with OCP in 2023? And what are we seeing as trends in terms of industry engagement with the organization? How does that speak to what's going on in terms of the innovation around cloud-led language campaign?

Yeah, Alison, great question. So first, you know, we're so excited to be back here in Europe for the first time since 2019. It's great to be back and see the European community. It's such a vibrant event. Really excited to see what happens over the next day and a half. In terms of just really engagement with the European community here, you know, happy to say that we've never had more engagement

from this titular market. We have dozens of new work streams that have come out of the woodwork, so to speak, just in the last year or so, many of them led by European companies and European individuals who are driving the innovation that we're all here to address today. What?

When you think about the underlying market forces that are driving that, what are we seeing in terms of technology adoption and requirements for customers that are driving this engagement in terms of new contributors and participants in SAP? I think there are really two or three key areas that we're seeing on the supply chain. One is the continuing momentum of end customers wanting multiple vendor options. So they want to mitigate that risk on the supply chain by

having multiple vendors. However, they like this idea of give me one specification, but let me have multiple suppliers. And this community-based development of specifications allows end customers to achieve that. And on the supply side of things, they can sit in the room with their end customers and be at the forefront of the technology roadmap in developing what makes sense for their market. So we're seeing this nice convergence of end-user requirements moving with the vendor ecosystem as well. I do like the latest analysis that came out of Omdia six months ago, where they interviewed the reasons why people are adopting OCP technology for the first time, more so than cat parents.

It was the idea that this is an opening design. That's a very, very big shift. It's usually CapEx and OpEx and energy efficiency. But the idea that it's open source is the first time that that's been at the top of the survey list. So that's one market force is to give me that openness as being reflected by the announcements that we've seen today, where you have one specification and we already have four manufacturers lined up to manufacture that product.

So I still think it's still a bit being on the types of industries that can adopt this fast. So it would be the cloud service providers, the telecommunications companies, the people, their web scale. But quickly on the backside of this is all of these different edge cases that are being pulled in of the enterprise companies that are moving very, very fast. It's fun to see these other industries start to pick up on these types of innovations that are coming in. You know, I think that I was a little bit jet-lagged when the keynote started this morning. I woke up in a hurry with an announcement

that was made this morning with a very big name making their first contribution to this, and Keating, which is Amazon, kind of belies that if any, been talking about in terms of the momentum of the organization. Tell me about the contributions in general. What are you seeing as trends? Who's contributing?

How are they contributing? And what does that Amazon contribution mean for the organization? Absolutely, Allison. So first, start with the contribution by Amazon. We're really thrilled that they've decided to contribute an enterprise edge gateway, so first of its kind contribution and one of the first contributions that follows the brand new OCP evolving contribution model, which is a modular contribution model, this modular process allows for the contribution of base

specs, design specs, and then thirdly, product specs. What this allows our community to do is to initially contribute specifications at the base level that are very IP-like, allowing for lots of flexibility for multiple vendors to then come along and at the second stage, contribute more specific, more IP-heavy design specifications that are more product specific. What this also allows for is for our community to contribute in ways that we really haven't seen before, namely multiple contributors coming together around a single purpose.

Not necessarily one contributor contributing a single monolithic spec, but multiple contributors. We've had groups as large as 13 come together. Um, competitors, collaborators now working together on these, um, IP light based specifications, which allow for flexibility of lights, which the community has never seen. When you look at any product's engine, um, you know, I think that one of the most interesting things that you said earlier, Steve, is that you published a product spec today for companies that are already willing to actually deliver that and work it. How has that changed over time, and what is driving that change, do you think, for having

a host of solution options for customers to choose from? Well, it's changed has been quite dramatic. So in the past, it's just been hyperscale led. So if a hyperscale sits in a room with a manufacturer, they say, this is the design everyone, that manufacturer is more than happy to make it to that one type of company. And they're fine with that type of supply. What's changed now is two areas. One is the push from the customer to want these open designs.

That's forcing, pulling the vendors this direction and saying, I need to open up and I need to play in a community. The second force, which is even more important is the overall level of comfort that a vendor has in being an open source organization. Open source has happened in software for many, many years, but it's just now really taking hold in the hardware space where people are understanding that I can make a I can share enough where I can still make money, get my market share. But at the same time, I'm accessing new markets that I would never have access to prior. And I'm moving the entire community forward by participating in this community-based engineering. So I'm moving the markets fast. So it's really, it's been enlightening. It's something that Michael and I struggle with every day is telling people that it's okay

to make these type of contributions. And so Michael spends a lot of his time educating people about the open source processing. It's okay if you're a hardware manufacturer and can open source this design and still do the thing. When you think about what Institute you touched on, there's lots of affinity with the hyperscalers. But this is a very different open-door view.

Lots of telcos here. Lots of talk about edge. Tell me about the use cases that are getting the most attention more quickly now. And what does that reflect in terms of market demand? We have an OCP marketplace, and we can watch the traffic and the number of people that are visiting this marketplace and what they're looking at. So one of the interesting trends is the way the movement from viewing traditional data center for data center SKUs or products, more toward components and edge and deep prints that we'd never seen before. So the use cases now we're seeing that open source designs are a bit more

flexible and allowing you to try new things. We have companies in France that are using those OSP designs for heat reuse boxes that are put in schools or buildings. We're also seeing edge use cases on the networking side, all the way up through the telecom stack in remote areas. We're seeing immersion capabilities and advanced cooling where these can be put, say on the top of a building or in the tropical environments. And that's not even touching on all of the new things that we're going to be seeing, say in something as small as say a time appliance card that synchronizes

the data center that's using high frequency trading, so OCP components, not just the entire stack, different components will start to permeate every industry that you'll see. You may not look at a particular financial institution and say, well, that's an OCP stat, but they'll be OCP components and then slowly the hyperscalers are using a full OCP stack, telecoms are using a percentage of theirs as OCP stack. And then that waterfall effect happens throughout the industries. And we're seeing, if I were to bet over the next six to 12 months, I would conference come up again, time and again in the sessions, is sustainability and the desire and mandate for more energy-efficient platforms

or resource-efficient platforms. What has changed to drive that focus on sustainability? And how do you see it playing out in the OCP? Look for some specifications being published. Absolutely, Alison. So, um, sustainability within OCP has been a very hot topic. Obviously the last couple of summits on the man, and it continues to be said today, we'll be moving forward in the future in 2022, um, the OCP foundation added sustainability as the fifth tenant of OCP, joining the four others.

What this now means is that all specifications and really all contributions that come through the OCP community must now align with the sustainability as an additional tenant. Essentially, they have to be able to defend their contribution as being sustainable in front of our Technical Steering Committee our incubation committee or IC, the elected group from our community who votes to accept or push back against all contributions that are brought forward. This means that all contributions do have to prove that they're sustainable. Sustainable.

And the way that they can do it is through the templates for these contributions, which are captured at the contribution level there. And then we've also shown our commitment to sustainability by launching the sustainability top-level projects. This project joins the other 11 top-of-the-line projects at OCP. So the sustainability project is continually looking at ways that they can help all the other projects reach their sustainability goals. Steve, anything else that you'd like to mention?

Yeah. Alison, you may have seen today in the keynote, every single keynote mentioned sustainability. But everyone is from a different type of company. You had a vendor, you had a co-location operator, a data, a data center operator, you had a hyperscaler all talking about sustainability. Well, how are they going to achieve this throughout their entire supply chain? They're going to do it.

They're going to do it in a community. And you may have heard the gentleman from KO data, the CTO mentioned that this is only going to happen in a, an open source and a collaborative community as you can achieve these sustainable goals. They said it shouldn't be left up to the data center operator to be on the hook for all of sustainability. And you had Meta up there saying, I'm going to focus on my supply chain, my 90% scope three emissions.

All of this is tied together. Everyone needs to work together on the metrics and the way that they're going to hit these net zero targets in a community-based environment. They cannot do it individually or waiting on some government regulation to give you this mandate. I love that answer. As somebody who cares about sustainability, it's wonderful to see the community taking a stand, the vendors putting their rewards behind it, and the full force of their wins behind it. I'm excited to see what comes of it. One final question for you guys. I think you've laid out a tremendous amount of about OCP and why folks should get involved. Michael, can you just share how folks could reach out to you guys to learn more about

OCP, the contribution process, membership, everything associated with getting involved with an OCP? So the first step towards getting involved with an OCP, please reach out and visit our website at www.opencompute.org. We have direct links to all of the various projects. These projects all have links to subscribe to a mailing list, links to join regular meetings. These meetings are open to everyone, whether you're an OCP member or not.

Please hop on, participate, join that conversation. At a deeper level, when the time is right, your organization or you as an individual would like to join OCP and formalize that commitment, you can reach out to membership at opencompute.org. We'd love to walk you through the various ways that you can get the most out of your involvement with the organization

and find ways that we can plug you into the community. On top of that, and lastly, the contribution process within OCP. Steve touched on this earlier, but I would love to stress a couple of points. Contributors to OCP at no point ever give up their rights to their IP. All contributions are made at the specification or design level using a contribution license agreement or CLA, which is essentially a patent on a certain license. So contributors do retain full patent rights. They are allowing end users of these contributions to utilize the contributed material underneath the limitations of the license. So as Steve mentioned earlier, you really aren't giving away any of your material when you're making a contribution

to the community. Rather, you're positioning yourself as a thought leader in the space. You're helping others in the community and you're driving us all towards a more open and sustainable future. Thanks so much, Michael, for that.

It was really clear. And thanks, guys, for being on today. It was a real pleasure for having you on the show. Thanks for taking time out of the conference. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.