Abstract
The fourth OCP (Open Compute Project) summit was held at Santa Clara, California, in January 2013. Since the summit was first initiated in 2011, the number of official members in the summit has reached over 50 in 2013. This year's summit focused on the prototype of photonic rack architecture jointly proposed by Facebook and Intel in an attempt to reduce costs for vendors and subscribers by developing disaggregated servers base on such architecture. This report profiles this new rack architecture and investigates the impact of the OCP 2013 on the overall data center industry.
Intel Continues to Invest Resources into Server Applications
The technology unveiled by Intel at the OCP 2013 demonstrated the company's devotion to cloud-based hardware. Looking at the whole ICT industry, as the global sales of desktop PCs have been declining for several years, Intel is facing difficulty to see further increase its share in the desktop PC market. In addition, Intel also experiences stagnant growth in the notebook PC business while facing fierce competition from ARM in the Smartphone and tablet markets. In face of these challenges, Intel has begun to focus more on products for use in server systems. Before the OCP 2013, Intel launched server-class Atom S1200 processor series. With a TDP (Thermal Design Power) as low as 6W, Atom S1200 processors can compete against ARM-based processors with respect to power conservation. The abovementioned moves revealed that Intel is shifting its focus to investments and applications at the server-end.
Modularization to Determine the Future Course of Server-class Processors
Modularization has long been one of major directions for the server industry. Aside from high scalability, modularization can also effectively help servers reduce costs. The disaggregated rack architecture jointly proposed by Facebook and Intel is also defined as an approach toward modularization, which divides major resources of a data center to three subsystems and connects them with an optic fiber. By adopting this design, it is easier to replace and upgrade the data center and save costs.
However, with IC technologies evolving these days, IC solutions have been integrated more and more functions, becoming highly-integrated, powerful chips. However, under the OCP's architecture, servers do not need such powerful IC solutions. Instead, they only need chips purely dedicate to computation tasks as other functions will be distributed to each subsystem for management. Should this architecture become popular in the future, it will certainly have considerable impact on today's mainstream IC designs and the industry's future development should merit further observation.
Appendix
Glossary of Terms
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CPE
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Customer Premise Equipment
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IaaS
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Infrastructure as a Service
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ODM
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Original Design Manufacturing
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OEM
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Original Equipment Manufacturing
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SoC
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System on Chip
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List of Companies
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Applied Micro
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ARM
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Calxeda
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EMC
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Facebook
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Fusion-io
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Hitachi
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Intel
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Micro
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NTT Data
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Orange
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Rackspace
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Scandisk
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Tilera
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