On 2 June 2016, we wrapped our second engineering workshop of the year, in San Jose. We hosted more than 100 attendees from 68 companies, including AT&T, Cumulus, Facebook, Google, and Nokia, at Quanta's San Jose office. Topics of discussion included some of the technical trends and challenges various industries among the OCP community are facing: C&I, Data Center, Networking, Storage, and Telecommunications.
We've provided an overview of key takeaways from a few of our community discussions below.
Telco
After the OCP Telco working group was moved to a top-level project in January, project co-lead Craig White led a collaborative discussion on what it means to bring the culture of openness that OCP offers to data center technologies for telecommunications companies. The discussion touched on how OCP will work with service providers, how ongoing discussions will be formatted, and how the group will prioritize next steps and challenges as we look toward the second half of the year.
Storage
Red Hat: Jacob Shucart, Sr. Cloud Storage Solution Architect, shared his view on what the future of storage will look like for the broader industry, including shifts toward the following:
- Common off-the-shelf hardware for a lower cost, standardized supply chain
- Scale-out architecture for increased operational flexibility
- Software-based intelligence for more programmability, agility, and control
- Open development process for more flexible, well-integrated technology
The conversation continued with a deep dive into overviews and specific use cases for Ceph and OpenStack, web application storage, multi-site object storage, erasure coding, webscale applications, databases, and kernel module flexibility.
Enmotus: Andy Mills, Co-founder and CEO of Enmoutus, discussed how the community can add analytical behavioral intelligence to the block storage layer. He provided an overview of the current state of evolving applications, stack, and devices and how the OCP community can tap into a fast and efficient storage device virtualization (SDV) layer, how behavioral analysis and automation of storage devices plays a role, both Enmotus FuzeDrive, which is a hybrid SSD class storage for any Intel or ARM class storage server, and open REST/JSON for storage device telemetry data collection.
Networking
Benu Networks: Rajat Ghai, CTO of Benu Networks, shared the 30,000-foot view of Open CBW (Campus, Branch, Wireless) and described two corresponding perspectives, including networking-centric and IT-centric. He also emphasized the benefits of leveraging the openness that Linux offers into a full stack OCP CBW.
Mellanox: Amit Katz, Vice President of ethernet switch sales at Mellanox, introduced Leaf-Spine, which is a 100GbE switch that works for hyperscale with fewer restrictions and external dependence, including eliminating the use of a proprietary, vendor-specific hardware, having the ability to scale without charging network design, and without dependency on vendor's proprietary features.
SnapRoute: Jason Forrester, CEO of SnapRoute, introduced FlexSwitch, which is a network protocol stack that allows you to manage, deploy, and program everything with a common API, run any agent, load only the protocols you need, includes HAL supports and extends SAI, OpenNSL, and OF-DPA, and provides complete choice of merchant silicon, CPU, and NOS. Below are some examples of what's available in FlexSwitch:
- Hardware platforms, including Wedge-40, Wedge-100 Celestica, Mellanox, Acton, and Barefoot
- ASICS, including Broadcom Trident II, Tomahawk, and Barefoot (software simulator)
- Protocols, including BGP, BFD, IPv5, ECMP, and policies
Please keep an eye out for our next OCP Engineering Workshop on the calendar here.
If you or your organization is interested in participating in the OCP community please take a look at our participation page. If you'd like more information on becoming an OCP member please email membership@opencompute.org.