Open Compute Project Tackles the Network
A new blog post from Frank Frankovsky, Chairman and President, Open Compute Project describes the impetus for Facebook launching the bold initiative. "It was our hope that we could spark more conversation and more collaboration around the development of efficient data center technologies," he writes.
Now the OCP community has since grown to more than 50 official members and thousands of participants. With a foundation to guide them, they've begun work on open designs for all elements of computing.
Progress has been steady, but something was missing says Frankovsy, and that something was the connecting layer:
"We are working together, in the open, to design and build smarter, more scalable, more efficient data center technologies – but we're still connecting them to the outside world using black-box switches that haven't been designed for deployment at scale and don't allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them."
That realization led to the latest OCP thrust: "developing a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch."
Najam Ahmad, who heads up the network engineering team at Facebook, will lead the project, and large number of organizations have announced their support. Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Facebook, Intel, Netronome, OpenDaylight, the Open Networking Foundation, and VMware will all be participating. The project will officially commence during the first OCP Engineering Summit being held at MIT on May 16.
Writes Frankovsky: "It's our hope that an open, disaggregated switch will enable a faster pace of innovation in the development of networking hardware; help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish; and ultimately provide consumers of these technologies with the freedom they need to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and efficient across the entire stack. This is a new kind of undertaking for OCP — starting a project with just an idea and a clean sheet of paper, instead of building on an existing design that's been contributed to the foundation — and we are excited to see how the project group delivers on our collective vision."
