10 years of OCP, and many more ahead
Last week, Inspur and the Open Compute Project Foundation hosted the 3rd annual OCP China Day, as an on-site conference in Beijing as well as a virtual event. It is a reflection on the 10 years since OCP’s inception and a look to the future, centered around the theme of “Open Compute for a New Decade: Decarbonization, Efficiency, Adoption”. The conference attracted 990 on-site industry insiders and 3,289 online participants. 37 technical reports were released by 23 leading open computing ecosystem members including Intel, ARM, Baidu, Tencent, Ali, JD.com, Western Digital, Seagate, and Inspur, discussing topics like data center infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and edge computing. It is evident that OCP continues to gain traction in the mainstream technology industry, as is its growing relevance to the future of data centers.
WATCH VIDEO » OCP China Day panelists discuss the past and future of OCP
In this blog post, technology analyst Omdia observed adoption trends over the last 5 years and expects “40% of the servers shipped in 2025 to be developed based on open standard, up from 7% in 2016”. The most significant and surprising implication, however, is that most of new deployments responsible for this growth will not be in hyperscale CSPs, but in tier-2 cloud, telecommunications, and the public sector. Whereas years ago, OCP was hardly spoken of outside the realm of hyperscale service providers, now the values of open hardware infrastructure have become increasingly apparent to an extensive proportion of the digital industry that relies on data centers.
A white paper published by Omdia and commissioned by Inspur comprehensively outlines why “Open Computing is for Everyone and is Here to Stay”. It traces OCP’s history from its foundation – energy efficient hardware design and cost-saving standardization – to today’s new initiatives which include applications in AI and edge computing. Read the white paper here.
As the data center has become the central keystone to business success, the biggest challenges we face include runaway power consumption, material waste, and ecological impact, precisely the problems that open standards were founded to tackle, ten years ago. Assuredly, OCP is here to stay for the next ten years, and many more.