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And, as not an employee of a multi billion pound company, how can I get involved?! I ask every time, and this project is amazing, but, it feels just for the bi

• pas 11y ago
  You can buy OCP compatible stuff, promote it, join the mailing list, blog about it, and so on. Otherwise, you can't. It's basically the club of kids who build this kind of hardware stuff (do R&D on infrastructure). When Facebook started OCP it seemed like an awkward initiative, after all, who would manufacture OCP-compatible stuff, when you can't find anything OCP-compatible at all? (It needs custom racks, for shame! Madness!) But slowly, it turned out, that there are multiple groups working on custom designs, trying to get out of the world of half-assed firmwares, crazy sales calls and useless support vectors associated with traditional vendors. So initially it only made sense if you had at least a few thousand servers and a team to work on that extra few percentages of efficiency. Nowadays, it seems a much more diverse club. And especially after the network stuff got opened up - the timing with SDN was right anyhow - they seem doomed to succeed.
  • skuhn 11y ago
    The equipment is available from various vendors, but the biggest hurdle is finding a datacenter facility that can handle OCP gear. Retail colocation is pretty much 19" racks only and 120V/208V power only. Even small scale wholesale datacenter deployments are tough to do if you want to go whole hog on OCP specs. You can still get OCP hardware in standard 19" form factors for these environments, but I don't personally see much point in it. You're seriously limiting your vendor and hardware selections, and if you aren't seeing the purported power efficiency gains then it's not worthwhile. The allure of eliminating the pain of classic vendors is still there, but there are paths through the Dell / HP / Supermicro maze that are tolerable without burning it down and going to OCP. There are other challenges with OCP's overall design in standard facilities beyond the server cabinet level too. Their (optional) battery cabinet design -- where you save on the facility cost by omitting the UPS bank in favor of battery cabinets for every triplet rack -- is explicitly forbidden at basically every top tier datacenter provider that I'm aware of. No batteries allowed on the floor because of the fire suppression system. You can definitely get a provider to build you a room where they'll let you have batteries on the floor, but that is a multi-megawatt sort of problem, not a 50kw sort of problem.
    • pas 11y ago
      Yes, you need at least a cage, so hundreds/thousands of servers minimum. And that's where power conversion gains might mean you get ~10-20 servers' electricity for "free". But that means you need to basically run your own DC operations. Cables, batteries, monitoring, hot spares, and good luck finding a DC that even allows you to speak about putting fire hazardous stuff "there". Yet it can be done. Money talks, hence the seemingly amazing success of OCP out of nothing. ... ah I should have read your last paragraph, before writing anything :)