The Open Compute Project holds its summit in San Jose this week and the effort, which revolves around making data center components and designs more efficient and interoperable, has notched a few wins in its nearly 5-year history, but the real accomplishment revolves around influence.
OCP was announced in April 2011 out of Facebook's data center designs and when you run down the accomplishments there's one big conclusion to draw: OCP's major win is that it shifted the conversation about hardware, vendors and customers.
A few accomplishments from OCP include:
The group has sparked a running dialogue between most of the heavy hitters in the data center.HP launched a white-box option to cater to the Open Compute crowd.Discussion about the OCP effort has helped speed up software-defined networking and storage approaches in corporate data centers.Hardware vendors have drawn design inspiration from the group and giants like Microsoft are using them in its own data centers.A byproduct of the supporters of OCP and key players has sped up the high-performance computing effort inside companies.And OCP's thinking probably sparked the hyperconverged system movement, which revolves around one box offering networking, storage and compute.
I could go on even though drawing direct lines between OCP's efforts and real commercial approaches is a bit tricky. I don't run into many enterprise bigwigs actively talking about OCP beyond a pilot once in a while. Why? Most companies aren't running cloud-scale data centers where OCP is most relevant.
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