If the current decade has seen the mainstream adoption of open source for software, the 2020’s may emerge as the golden era of open hardware.
Momentum behind open hardware, the application of open source methodology to IT equipment design, is growing at a pace.
Mark Kier, director of business development at Horizon Technology, says the impact of open hardware allows growth-stage companies to adopt “the latest and greatest hardware and designs” that the hyperscalers use in their data centers.
Kier’s comments come as open hardware proponents for the data center prepare to gather in San Jose CA (March 14–15, 2019) for the Open Compute Project’s annual summit.
The busy two-day schedule will see presentations from the likes of Open Compute Project (OCP) board members Microsoft and Facebook alongside a range of smaller-scale sessions and workshops.
ENTERPRISE DATA CENTER
The commercial outlook for open hardware players certainly appears rosy amid continued adoption of Open Compute hardware in the enterprise data center.
According to a recent study conducted by IHS Markit on behalf of OCP, revenue share for OCP gear (excluding that bought by OCP board members such as Facebook and Microsoft) is set to rise to more than 5% of total market share by 2022.
Servers, storage, and networking are expected to grow most strongly of all product categories, with automotive and manufacturing poised for the strongest adoption by sector.
OCP adoptees are attracted by the prospect of cost savings, increased power efficiency, and the “feature flexibility” of the gear, the foundation says.
“The market ecosystem for OCP-certified equipment continues to mature, with more diversity for increased choice and an expanded supply chain allowing more tier-two CSPs, telcos and enterprise consumers to participate,” remarks Cliff Grossner of IHS Markit.
“OCP equipment market drivers such as serviceability, disaggregation and the flexibility to add new features took on a greater importance this year, which typically happens when a market matures and more mainstream buyers deploy.”
IT ASSET RECOVERY
There’s little doubt the flexibility of open hardware offers a natural fit with increasingly powerful data center technologies.
Stephen Buckler, chief operating officer of Horizon Technology, points to emergent protocols such as NVMe and NVMe-oF as well as the promise of storage-class memory as evidence of the need for increasingly flexible hardware.
“The important thing is to create standards to allow these different platforms to work together and prevent lock-in vendor scenarios as in the past,” Buckler says.
It’s not just the cost savings and performance flexibility attracting IT managers in the data center. Open hardware also has a positive environmental effect, driving up energy efficiency through innovations in rack design and server deployment, in turn greasing the wheels of the secondary market for data center hardware.
The OEMs continue to warm up to the benefits of open hardware, proving increasingly receptive to outside collaboration, streamlined models, and greater standardization. The black box approach is “getting harder and harder to pull off,” says Buckler.
OCP was founded in 2011 to encourage sharing and standardization among organizations that are users and builders of data centers, including hardware and software manufacturers across the globe.
The foundation operates with a “grid to gates” philosophy. This is a highly modular approach, looking at everything from the power grids that serve data centers, to the transistor logic gates that make up the computing chips on the motherboards of the computers in the data center.
