OCP Technology Day at Facebook - Event Summary


OCP Technology Day at Facebook - Event Summary

On 30 August, 2016, The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation hosted 114 attendees from 70 organizations at the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, CA, including Adobe, AT&T, Bank of America, Canonical, Cisco, Delta Products, Facebook, Fidelity Investments, Google, Microsoft, Orange, Penguin Computing, Panasonic, Pinterest, Radisys, Red Hat, Uber, Verizon, Visa and Walmart. It was a full day interactive session with great community involvement and collaborative discussions.

The day began with a General Session which included a welcome from Amber Graner, Operations Director and Community Manager, for the OCP Foundation. Also present were Rocky Bullock, Co-CEO of the Open Compute Project Foundation, as well as new team members Dirk Van Slyke, Director of Marketing and Communications, and Bill Carter, the Foundation’s new Chief Technology Officer, who introduced the updated OCP INSPIRED™ and OCP ACCEPTED™ contribution program processes.

There were five sessions throughout the day:

  1. Richard Wareing of Facebook provided an in-depth overview of deploying and managing open source Gluster POSIX file system on OCP hardware at scale. Facebook operates one of the largest Gluster environments in the world, and the talk spoke of the challenges, approaches and lessons learned from using it under production workloads.

  2. Mark Shaw of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Server Infrastructure team provided an overview of systems and features he has been standardizing on their server designs, with their first contributions of the Open CloudServer to Open Compute Project over two years ago. Going forward Microsoft is re-vamping its Open CloudServer architecture with a system that is more modular, flexible and lower cost than before. Focused on EIA 19" rack deployments, OCS vNext has been designed to better meet the widely varying needs of the OCP community. Preliminary details on the OCS vNext compute module will be shared early in the design cycle, allowing the OCP community opportunity to build upon and work plans for delivery. 

  3. Thomas Cameron, James Labocki, Gregory Jones from Red Hat  spoke about their  software communities and their vision that drives the enterprise datacenter.  Red Hat  also highlighted how its Open Source software offerings such as Red Hat OpenStack, Ceph and Gluster is being enabled on OCP Hardware.

  4. Christian Reis, Product Manager, David Duffey, Director of Technical Partnerships, and Luke Williams, Open Networking Technical Partner Manager of Canonical presented how to automate the deployment and management of datacenter servers, storage, and networking using MAAS and Juju to enable and Open Source environment of choice on OCP hardware. This includes being able to select preferred cloud platform like OpenStack, big data solution, SDN, VNFs, network control software (FBOSS, Quagga, etc.), and even the operating system on OCP servers and app-enabled OCP networking gear.

  5. Lawrence Ying from Google described the “collection view” of disks and the focus on tail latency, driven by live services, and placing new and different requirements on disks form the central element of Cloud-based storage, whose demand far outpaces the considerable rate
    of innovation in disks. Exponential growth in demand, already in progress for 15+ years, implies that most future disks will be in data centers and thus part of a large collection of disks. Beyond defining key metrics for data-center disks, he explored a range of new physical design options and changes to firmware that could improve these metrics. 


Presentations can be found here. Please note, we have not received all the presentations, but we will update this link when we receive them.

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About OCP:  

The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) organization which was founded in 2011 by Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim. Our mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond.

Find out more about you can participate in the OCP Community at: http://opencompute.org/participate