Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

LAS VEGAS – IBM just announced that it’s basing its cloud products and services on open cloud architecture.

IBM is placing its considerable heft behind OpenStack, a cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. The nonprofit Open Stack Foundation manages the product, and IBM announced it would be a big-time sponsor last April.

“It’s a vote of confidence for the maturity of the [OpenStack] technology,” said Robert Leblanc, the senior vice president of IBM Software (pictured, left), on a conference call with the press. IBM made the announcement at its Las Vegas cloud conference “PULSE,” which began Sunday and ends Friday.

The hope is that IBM’s existing customers will adopt open source-based technologies, which can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

“I’m excited to see IBM throw their considerable weight behind Open Stack,” said Deepak Advani, a general manager at IBM customer Tivoli, on the call. 

IBM is a long-time contributor to the OpenStack project, along with companies like Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, and Yahoo.

“I think the first couple years of OpenStack is really about helping people run and configure it,” said Scott Sanchez, Rackspace’s strategy lead for Open Cloud in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “But we are seeing a tremendous amount of traction,” he said.

Going forward, IBM will dedicate 500 of its developers to work on open cloud projects. IBM also announced that its Smart Cloud offering (the cloud portfolio used by 5,000 customers) will incorporate open cloud pieces. ”It brings along so many capabilities ” said Leblanc, who pointed out Smart Cloud launched before there even was an Open Stack movement.

IBM’s rebranded offering, “SmartCloud orchestrator,” is currently in beta testing. Benefits for customers include a reduction in operational costs, better integration with third party tools, and a simplification of cloud services.

Jim Smith, a managing partner for Mohr Davidow Ventures, said this is a step forward in “breaking the chains for high cost technologies.” On the conference call, he said that for large businesses and entrepreneurs, “the canvas for innovation is moving to the cloud.”

Photo illustration by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — This morning, Facebook and a slew of big names in cloud computing and data center hardware unleashed a whole boatload of news — new hardware designs, new jobs, and new partnerships — all around the Open Compute Project.

AMD and Intel both showed off some new hardware products. Rackspace announced it has customized its own server hardware around OCP designs — and contributed its customizations back to the project. And Fusion-io was talking about its new 3.2TB ioScale card, also an OCP product.

The Open Compute Project is the Internet and hardware industries’ attempt to make computing vastly more efficient by pooling knowledge and resources. Close competitors are actually working collaboratively to come up with a better motherboard, a better power supply. And it’s not just industry titans, either; anyone can download and modify the specs for Open Compute hardware.

Why should anyone with a day job and a social life care about this?

Two reasons: First, every time you click anything anywhere on the Internet, it takes a tiny toll on the environment — something with the impact of an ant’s footstep on a boulder. It takes electricity to power the machines that process the clicks and carry the data around the world, and most of that energy ain’t coming from wind farms.

Second, every click, every bit of data costs the companies behind web services a tiny amount of money, maybe hundredths of a cent, maybe thousandths of a cent. They’re paying to power the services, to store the data, and to employ the folks who keep the machines running.

In aggregate, those tiny costs add up to tons and tons of carbon and billions of dollars in bottom-line costs for companies like Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So by putting aside their differences and competitiveness just long enough to make better, faster, cheaper, kinder-for-the-planet servers, these companies are ensuring a better environment for all of us as well as lower operating costs (and higher profits) for themselves — something Facebook in particular can’t afford to overlook.

This open-source hardware movement is still in its early days. Today marks the start of the Project’s fourth Open Compute Summit; while the first Open Compute efforts were driven by Facebook, today’s summit is thick with IT corporations from around the world.

“We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” said Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky (pictured above and below) today in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”

And as hardware becomes more open, not unlike the world of software, where open-source is the backbone of most systems, Frankovsky and others try to look into the near future and figure out where Open Compute and its network of partners should go next.

“Where it’s all headed in my mind is about breaking up the monolith … disaggregating the system design,” he said.

What that means, he continued, is changing the way data center hardware works. Instead of moving slowly and changing out whole stacks of hardware, Frankovsky says hardware should become — and is becoming — more flexible to meet consumers’ needs, more customizable to different configurations, and more quick to adapt to innovation.

“Today, one of the biggest challenges in hardware design is trying to predict where the software’s gonna be,” said Frankovsky. “There’s an impedance mismatch between the speed at which software moves and the speed at which hardware can move.”

He said “smarter technology refreshes and upgrades” is another challenge. So for OCP, breaking up the monolith means malleable configurations for data center gear, smarter tech upgrades, faster innovation for speedier components, and above all, openness.

New OCP members announced today include players in storage, telecom, and microprocessors: SanDisk, EMC2, Fusion-io, HGST, ARM, Tilera, Calxeda, NTT Data, and Orange. Cole Crawford, a Linux Foundation advisor and former Nebula exec, has been named OCP’s COO and is its first full-time employee.

Another exciting news item is the opening of OCP’s first international chapter, OCP Asia Pacific. With partners like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, OCP already has a significant foothold in Asian markets, which are themselves hugely important hubs for hardware design and manufacturing. Interest in the region has been so strong that Frankovsky said some interested parties had taken it upon themselves to translate OCP specs into Japanese. Plus, he pointed out, “Asia’s going to have their own way to focus on their own issues,” such as earthquake tolerance and high-density physical spaces.

For Facebook’s part, the company is open-sourcing cold-storage versions of OpenVault and OpenStack, which are in use in its new-ish Sub-Zero cold storage facility, as well as Dragonstone, a new database server for its Swedish data center featuring high availability with dual motherboards and power supplies.

For more specifics, check out the OCP’s blog post on today’s announcements, and stay tuned for more news from the Summit.

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Advanced Micro Devices is announcing today that it has designed its standard server motherboard to be more modular and open under the AMD Open 3.0 platform.

That platform, previously code-named Roadrunner,” is a rethinking of the server motherboard to match the standards developed by the Open Compute Project, which is a consortium run by big data center customers such as Facebook and Goldman Sachs as well as server component vendors such as Intel and Arista Networks. AMD hopes the redesign will help it gain market share in server chips, one of the most lucrative computing platforms in the enterprise.

The Open Compute Project was formed to improve the efficiency of servers and to enable data center operators to avoid being locked into solutions provided by component vendors. AMD’s Open 3.0 platform aims to make servers more flexible, efficient, and simple. AMD is targeting markets including high-performance computing, cloud infrastructure, and storage.

“AMD for their 3.0 spec really listened closely to what members were asking for,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “What they came back with was a configurable solution for high performance, general-purpose and storage workloads. AMD really needs a boost in the server space and this could help.”

Many servers are designed with a one-size-fits-most approach. But they can be inefficient when handling unique work loads. AMD is providing tailored solutions with the right combination of power, space and cost, said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s server business, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“This is going to influence how our customers purchase servers in the future,” he said. “They want their data centers to be as efficient as possible. We are launching the first truly open, modular server. It is exciting for our customers. They are demanding this kind of openness.”

The result will be a lot like putting standard engines or steering wheels into cars. Now application suites will run across different servers from different manufacturers. That gives server administrators more management flexibility.

The AMD solution is currently being evaluated by Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs.“This is a realization of the Open Compute Project’s mission of ‘hacking conventional computing infrastructure,’” said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook. “What’s really exciting for me here is the way the Open Compute Project inspired AMD and specific consumers to collaboratively bring our ’vanity-free’ design philosophy to a motherboard that suited their exact needs.”

The AMD platform includes the recently announced the recently announced AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors. It can be installed in standard 19-inch racks, and it can fit one, two, or three processor servers. Each server has 12 memory sockets (4 channels with 3 DIMMs each), 6 Serial ATA (SATA) connections per board, a 1 dual channel gigabit Ethernet NIC with integrated management, up to four PCI Express expansion slots, a mezzanine connector for custom module solutions,2 serial ports and 2 USB ports. Specific PCI Express card support is dependent on usage case and chassis height.

The design supports add-on technology from Broadcom and Mellanox. Tyan and Quanta are making the board. More manufacturers are pending.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project, a huge effort to create and promote open-source hardware, is hosting its first-ever hardware hackathon.

The hackathon will take place next month in Santa Clara, Calif., at the OCP’s Open Compute Summit. The hackathon’s goal is to create a set of open-source computer hardware building blocks — kind of like Lego for computing. These blocks would eventually be applied to real-world use cases in large data centers in ways that would boost energy efficiency, make repairs simpler, and reduce overall data center costs.

Hackathon participants will be limited to just 100 people, and hardware hackers will spend between 6 and 10 hours working on the project during the two-day conference. Hackers will work in teams and will present their results at the end of the Summit.

The hackathon is a joint project between the OCP and Upverter, a DEMO-launched open-source hardware startup we’ve been keeping tabs on since it launched back in September 2011. Upverter founder Zac Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackers in the upcoming event will be using Upverter’s software tools for the hackathon. Upverter will also be giving participants plenty of reference materials, tutorials, and one-on-one guidance throughout the event.

The Open Compute Summit will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center on January 16 and 17, 2012. You can register now for the hackathon and the Summit. The ideation phase — which Upverter will also help with — starts as soon as you register.

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

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What do HP, Salesforce, AMD, VMWare, and Alibaba all have in common?

They’re all partners in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project, a group that aims to revolutionize computer hardware through the power of open-source collaboration.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project is having its third Summit event today, and it’s bringing together some of the best minds in the world to solve problems of data center efficiency, server design, and more.

Most of its partner companies have a stake in the issue, either because they use massive server resources, because they design and sell hardware and chips, or because they are involved in creating the software that makes all this hardware more efficient.

“The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months — has been nothing short of amazing,” wrote Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware design guru, in a blog post this morning.

Frankovsky notes that the OCP now includes HP, AMD, Tencent, Salesforce, VMware, Canonical, Vantage, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling among its members, and that HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the project’s Incubation Committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals for official OCP support.

As far as new projects are concerned, Frankovksy said OCP has accepted proposals for a vanity-free storage server called “Knox”) and two high-efficiency motherboards, code-named “Roadrunner” and “Decathlete,” designed with the specific needs of financial services companies in mind.

OCP is also merging specs with Baidu and Tencent for its Open Rack design for servers.

Finally, the OCP project is doing what most open-source projects do these days: It’s launching support services for customers to easily and comfortably get started with its Open Rack designs. The OCP Solutions Provider program will allow companies to sell and use hardware based on OCP specs.

“Companies currently pursuing Solutions Provider status include Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet, as well as new business units from Quanta and Wistron (called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively) that have been launched to sell directly to consumers,” Frankovsky concluded.

The OCP got rolling about one year ago. At that time, Facebook’s vision of open-source hardware got started because Facebook itself was having trouble scaling its servers out in a way that made business sense.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” Facebook OCP lead Amir Michae told VentureBeat in an interview last fall.

“It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community,” Michael concluded, encouraging other companies to get involved in the open-source hardware project.

Stay tuned for more coming up soon from today’s Open Compute Project Summit.

Also, if this is a story you find interesting, you should check out what Facebook is doing with Ringark, its mobile browser testing suite, and the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Your Facebook profile doesn’t exist on your computer or in some nebulous cloud called “the Internet.”

It’s stored deep in the brick-and-mortar walls of real-world fortresses. It comes to life as electricity flows through wires that connect tens of thousands of servers to the grid.

And for some users some of the time, it lives among the wind and scrub brush of central Oregon, where Facebook has erected its first fully functioning data center in a town called Prineville.

The still-young company leases equipment and facilities at various locations, but the Prineville center is something special. Facebook designed and built this place from the ground up. More interestingly, it’s shared its customized hardware designs and super-efficient operational specs with anyone who wants to see them.

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon poking our nose around Facebook’s Prineville data center. We’ll have a longer video tour of the place posted soon, but we wanted to share the images from the trip as soon as possible.

Enjoy the data center porn, and be sure to read up on why Facebook thought open-source hardware was so important in the first place.