(Pictured above is Bill Carter, CTO of the OCP Foundation)
In 2011, the Internet giant Facebook announced to publicly share its own data center design architecture and launched the Open Compute Project (OCP) open hardware project. The launch of this project means that the design, production and manufacture of the server, network and storage hardware equipment required by the data center will be determined by end users such as Facebook. In 2016, Facebook announced that its data centers were all made up of OCP hardware. In 2014, Microsoft joined the OCP project and announced in November 2017 that it would expose its next-generation cloud hardware design Olympus project for hundreds of large-scale data centers around the world through OCP.
In 2012, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Telecom initiated the establishment of the Scorpion Organization (later ODCC). The purpose and mission of ODCC and OCP are exactly the same, and even the technical standard framework is mostly the same. . At the end of 2016, LinkedIn launched OPEN19 again. OPEN19 defines a 19-inch-wide cabinet server based on the traditional technical standard. Unlike OCP and ODCC, which are oriented towards large-scale CSP cloud service provider data centers, OPEN19 is suitable for data centers of any size.
As the only server manufacturer that joined OCP\ODCC\OPEN19, Peng Zhen, Vice President of Inspur Group, said that the core purpose of the open hardware organization is to build an industrial ecology based on new standards, and the hardware design experience from leading Internet companies and cloud service operators , will also benefit the digital transformation of traditional enterprises.
Far-reaching industrial influence
In March 2018, OCP and market research agency HIS jointly released the OCP Global Influence Survey Report: OCP has assembled nearly 200 member companies and more than 4,000 engineers, and non-OCP board member companies have created 1.2 billion US dollars in 2017. of OCP equipment revenue, and is expected to purchase more than $6 billion in OCP equipment in 2021. Among OCP's board members, including Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Goldman Sachs, they have had a huge impact on the hardware industry.
Open hardware organizations like OCP are having a profound impact on the Internet and cloud computing industries, and these will undoubtedly have an impact on the digital transformation of traditional enterprises in the cloud computing era. The three global Tier 1 CSPs, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, are also the TOP 3 in global server ownership. According to the calculation of different calibers, the number of servers in each company is no less than 2 million. It is estimated that Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have more than 500,000 servers in 2015, and these companies purchase more than 100,000 servers each year. It is estimated that the total number of servers in China's Tier 1 CSP will soon exceed 1 million. .
At the 2018 Inspur Cloud Data Center Partner Conference (IPF) on April 26, 2018, Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer of the OCP Foundation, said in an interview with the media that compared with open source software organizations, open hardware organizations bring more benefits to enterprises. The impact is more profound. This is because hardware is not like software that can adjust the code at any time. Once the specifications, parameters, processes, etc. of the hardware are set, it will bring about adjustment of the production line, physical adjustment of the data center, etc. These adjustments are not only expensive but also slow. Once adjusted in place, it is difficult to change again in a short period of time.
An open hardware organization such as OCP is to bring together hardware manufacturers, users and industry organizations to gather their respective needs, especially to share the hardware design requirements and experience of large CSPs, so as to influence hardware design and production earlier. and manufacturing, thereby accelerating the responsiveness of hardware to the market.
Peng Zhen said that Inspur and other server solution providers play an irreplaceable role in the industrialization of OCP and other open hardware organizations. On the one hand, Inspur can make these standards more feasible and perfect in the development and testing of technical standards, and reduce unnecessary technical costs; Standard to application industry landing.
The competition has gone deep into the hardware
At the time of digital transformation, more and more traditional enterprises are joining the wave of cloud computing. According to data from Synergy Research, by the end of 2017, the number of hyperscale data centers in the world had reached 390, of which the United States ranked first with a 44% share, and China ranked second with an 8% share. On the other hand, the "National Data Center Application Development Guidelines (2017)" shows that by the end of 2016, my country had a total of 1,641 data centers in use, with an overall installed capacity of 9.952 million servers; a total of 437 data centers under construction and planned to be installed. The scale is about 10 million servers, and the overall growth rate of the industry is relatively fast.
Hu Leijun, vice president of Inspur Group, said at the 2018 IPF that Inspur actively promotes the opening of hardware. The original brand server basically covered customers in the form of channels, and covered the application needs of most customers through a standardized product. But for today's customers, the scale of applications and data centers is getting bigger and bigger, and IT accounts for a higher and higher proportion of the entire business cost, so the operation and maintenance efficiency, operation and maintenance cost, and the vitality brought by operation and maintenance to the business And user experience will become the core competitiveness of enterprises. In the digital age, enterprises need to be fully polished, from every line of code in application software to every piece of hardware in the underlying servers of the data center, in order to be able to widen the gap with competitors.
Large-scale Internet companies and cloud service providers have already carried out in-depth operation and maintenance in their highly integrated large-scale data centers, relying on advanced IT systems, so that they have the strength and ability to build their own customized servers, storage, networks and other hardware. The data centers of small and medium-sized Internet enterprises, cloud service providers and traditional enterprises do not have the need for scale, nor do they have the strength and need to customize their own hardware. Through platforms such as OCP and Inspur, they have opened up with OCP and others. Server manufacturers that cooperate with hardware organizations can share the advanced experience of Tier 1 enterprises.
Bill Carter said that most of OCP's products were used and sold in North America at the beginning. The next growth point after North America came from Europe, and the biggest growth point in the next five years came from Asia, the most important market in Asia. is from China. In October 2017, the 2-way server node ON5263M5 developed by Inspur North America San Jose R&D Center officially passed the OCP certification and was officially released on the OCP official website; Inspur ON5263M5 server is the first in the OCP community to adopt the latest Skylake technology and industry standards product. Bill Carter said that the ON5263M5 server not only has ideal high-efficiency performance, but also fully complies with the OCP open technology standard, making it very easy to productize and mass-produce.
Peng Zhen said that Inspur has always been committed to building a symbiotic relationship with CSPs, and Inspur's business chain has achieved full connection with cloud service provider users, co-design and joint research and development. On the one hand, Inspur adopts a daily report system and regular high-level communication system for operator users, and incorporates operator user needs into the company's business planning in a timely manner, and tightly couples business collaboration. On the other hand, the global supply chain procurement experts of both parties jointly formulate procurement strategies to reduce procurement costs and improve the efficiency of R&D and production. At present, the update cycle of Inspur Internet product line is only 1 year, and this cycle can even be shortened to 3 months, that is, Inspur can deliver servers to users' data centers in batches within 3 months at the earliest.
According to IDC's forecast, by 2020, more than 50% of the Fortune Global 2000 companies will have the competitiveness of most of their businesses based on their ability to create products, services and experiences based on new-generation digital technologies. The enormous pressure of digital transformation is shifting to the challenge of transforming enterprise-class data centers to cloud computing innovation. By cooperating with open hardware organizations such as OCP and server manufacturers such as Inspur that actively participate in the open computing ecosystem, digital transformation is expected to accelerate overall. (Text / Ningchuan)