Optimised data centers with open infrastructures are becoming ever more crucial to meet increasing demands of cloud service providers, telcos and enterprises in the digital age.
As data volumes rise, older data centers are not always equipped to implement newer styles of hardware or designed to efficiently handle fully loaded and fully equipped racks.
On W.Media’s third Tech Talk, Steve Helvie, the VP of Channel at the Open Compute Project Foundation, revealed they are seeing an increase in density per rack across various markets. This shows the increasing demand on data centers and the types of workloads people are starting to run.
“Even public sectors are starting to ask more about the types of GPUs they may be able to run,” said Mr. Helvie.
This increase in density creates issues around the types of facilities where these racks can be deployed. And these new types of hardware also brings concerns for power efficiency to the rack.
OCP addressed these issues by recently developing the OCP Ready™ Facility Recognition Program. This includes a set of guidelines and a site assessment test to identify optimised data centers capable of handling, understanding and supporting OCP racks and infrastructure.
“End customers are looking for those facilities that understand OCP and can rely on local support at that facility and know that they can grow in that facility,” said Mr. Helvie.
OCP is now in their third version of their Open Compute Rack, which will be the most comprehensive and converged rack architecture, as a lot of OCP members, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft have come together on this version. The newest version of the rack covers density issues as well as the new wave of architecture.
“The main goal of the OCP Community is reducing investment operation cost, reducing energy consumption, and most importantly, sharing ideas and know-how,” said Resul Altinkilic, Project Manager of Global Key Accounts for IT at Rittal, a Platinum OCP member.
But why should you choose open hardware? This was an important question Rittal asked to their customers and partners. The top three answers given were cost reduction, power efficiency and standardisation.
“When you use one specification and you have the flexibility to buy the same rack or hardware under the same specifications, it is standardisation. With power efficiency, you don’t have to transition from AC to DC,” said Mr. Altinkilic.
Singapore-based data center provider, SpaceDC, became the first data center in Asia to achieve the OCP Ready™ certification by demonstrating its ability to create highly efficient, optimised data centers and meet OCP guidelines.
SpaceDC proved to OCP that their JAK2 facility in Indonesia was capable of accommodating racks weighing 500kg and allowing end-users to smoothly deploy fully populated OCP Racks without delay.
Busbars and fan walls are used throughout their data centers to enable configuration of racks to high densities and remove the need for maintenance staff to enter the data center for electrical or mechanical services, said Darren Hawkins, the Founder and CEO of SpaceDC.
These moves by tech giants, hardware solution developers and data center providers to join OCP’s Community has started to show us why the OCP hardware market is forecasted as a US$10 billion industry.
> Watch ‘A Look Inside an OCP Optimised Data Center in Asia Pacific’ on demand
