GigaOM » open-compute-foundation

The market for traditional servers is being enveloped by the cloud

Barb Darrow — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:41:17 +0000

There’s good reason that Dell, HP and the other major brand server vendors are rushing to build clouds of their own. It’s increasingly obvious that big cloud infrastructure providers — which used to be the biggest customers of these server makers — are contracting out more of their server manufacturing to less familiar names. This is also probably a big part of the reason why these vendors are considering drastic action: Dell may take itself private and HP recently reopened the prospect that it will sell off business units.

The latest to go is Rackspace which today announced plans to contract out its server design to Wistron and Quanta. These are companies which, oh by the way, often build servers for the aforementioned branded server makers anyway. This really is a case of cutting out the middleman.

Supermicro, which builds energy-sipping servers, is another favorite manufacturer among big infrastructure providers like SoftLayer and Joyent, which puts out RFPs for its servers. “It’s the components and ratios that matter. We currently use three different chassis and three different boards: one chassis is Dell and two are Supermicro,” said Jason Hoffman CTO of San Francisco-based Joyent.

Softlayer, another big cloud platform provider uses Intel-based Supermicro servers. “They’re our design but standard products from Supermicro — there are lots of advantages to this approach including cost,” said Softlayer chief strategy officer George Karidis.

The webscale server trend was accelerated by the Open Compute Foundation’s push to provide a blueprint for such servers that many manufacturers can follow. (Rackspace’s news came out of the Open Compute Summit on Wednesday.)

This does not mean the market for more differentiated servers completely evaporates because, as GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham has explained, the server market has segmented into a handful of categories including one for enterprise servers. But it is clear that many, many more workloads are flowing to big cloud providers.

David Linthicum, CTO of Blue Mountain Labs and a GigaOM Pro analyst agreed. “There will always be a market for name-brand servers, Dell and HP included,” he said via email. ”However, their market is changing. Keep in mind that they saw this coming, and are all building public cloud offerings. Some of the motivation here could be that they are becoming competitors with on-demand services … You have to give them credit for seeing the writing on the wall, and figuring out how to sell their technology in a changing market. For the most part both Dell and HP are doing the right things.

The question then is whether they did the right things fast enough to keep their overall brands — and their server hardware — relevant.

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Facebook and Open Compute want a biodegradable server chassis

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:32:31 +0000

Facebook is sponsoring an Open Compute Foundation contest with Purdue to develop a more sustainable server chassis. The goal of the contest is to build a biodegradable box — instead of steel casing — to hold the innards of a server. Since most companies replace their servers every two to three years (the Purdue contest site says four), why not make the case out of something that doesn’t need to be recycled at the end of its rather short life?

From the design challenge web site:

Servers are typically replaced about every four years. This is necessary to maintain fast, reliable equipment. Unfortunately, this results in a lot of waste. Open Compute wants to change this starting with the server chassis. These are typically made of steel, which is recyclable, but even recycling generates waste. What would happen if these chassis could be placed in compost instead?

Purdue University’s College of Technology entrepreneurship program, called Tech Ventures, will work with the Foundation and the social network to get students to rethink the humble chassis. The challenge will begin with a Computer and Information Technology (CNIT) course at Purdue in the spring semester. I, for one, can’t wait to see the cardboard server chassis, although in some ways I think eliminating the chassis and making the rack the protective unit for the boards and components might make more sense.

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New Open Rack spec shows how important two inches can be

Barb Darrow — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:15:26 +0000

The quest for energy-sipping webscale data centers continues incrementally with the release this week of the new Open Rack 1.0 specification outlining the design of data center racks.

This Open Compute Project specification focuses, as GigaOM has reported, on moving data center racks from 19-inch to 21-inch widths — the 19-inch requirement being a holdover (believe it or not) from railroad switching equipment.

According to a blog post on the project’s website:

The 537mm width (about 21 inches) of the chassis has a lot of practical engineering benefits, like improved airflow, greater energy efficiency, and better volumetric efficiency, as there is more space used for IT equipment instead of just air and metal. The rack itself is 600mm wide, which makes it the same as the overall width of a 19″ rack, so it fits into existing data centers worldwide.

The addition of more usable space in the rack, means that components can be arranged differently. Switches, for example, no longer need to go atop the power zone, for example.

Details on the specification are posted on Github.

The Open Compute Project was initiated by Facebooklast year as a way to promote what it has learned from its own energy-efficient data centers as a model for others. Since that time it has helped form a multi-vendor foundation.

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Joi Ito: Open-source hardware is a no brainer

Barb Darrow — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:30:38 +0000

Open-source hardware is on its way, and it will foster a new era of innovation, according to MIT Media Lab director Joichi “Joi” Ito.

The emergence of freely available hardware designs and near-free components will unleash the same sort of technology innovation that open-source software kicked off a decade or so ago, Ito said Tuesday.

“If you want to build a video camera, some day you’ll be able to find all the standard parts, the designs online for free, and then you’ll only design the pieces of the product that interest you,” Ito said at an MITX fireside chat in Cambridge, Mass.

Developers would focus their attention on the more valuable hardware they build atop that standard base, just as software developers write specialized software that runs on Linux and open-source middleware instead of proprietary Unix or Windows operating systems and Oracle’s WebLogic or IBM’s WebSphere middleware.

The industry is starting to talk open-source hardware in the context of the Open Compute Foundation, which focuses on data center servers. Ito is talking of far broader application.

Ito used the birth of Google as an example of the creativity open-source software enabled. If Google Co-Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page started out without open source, they would have had to spend big money on operating systems and other commercial software to do what they did, he said. But, because of open source, “all they had to do is write a little software and connect it to university network [all] for a couple thousand dollars,” he said.

The advent of open-source software decimated start-up costs of software companies and that, in turn, sparked an “explosion of innovation in the valley because you could try anything,” he said.

In the same manner, the adoption of the open-source model will siphon costs out of hardware design, because companies won’t have to devote as much capital to equipment. They could download designs to build them themselves or sign a contract manufacturer to build them.

The cost savings will push hardware innovation “into smaller companies, into academic labs and dorm rooms,” Ito said.

Advances in 3-D printing will also make it easier and less expensive for smaller companies to quickly create physical prototypes of their designs, leveling another hurdle.

“The idea of printing gadgets is not far away … not as far away as you think,” Ito said.

That all means smaller companies that innovate can sustain themselves while staying small. ”VCs used to snark that that’s not a company, that’s a feature. Products and companies used to have to be huge things, things like AOL. [But] today you can have very small, focused companies.”

And small companies, he said, are where innovation thrives.

Panel photo courtesy of MITX director Debi Kleiman.

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Webscale and cloud are changing the server value chain. Who wins?

Stacey Higginbotham — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:02:49 +0000

The compute and server world is changing rapidly, with webscale companies such as Facebook and Amazon dominating the web and creating new lines of business. With that comes change to the value chain of server and silicon companies, and we now stand at an inflection point that could alter the server market radically. One one side is the commodity hardware built around Intel’s x86 architecture, rich in history and powering 90 percent of the world’s servers. On the other lies the competition: ARM-based architectures put forth by new and existing chip companies and server makers. Which stands to win? We take a close look at both here.

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