LinkedIn is joining the Open Compute Project as it looks to better manage the sharp increase of data generation across its platform.
The world’s leading professional networking community, which boasts more than 562 million users globally, has been going gangbusters in the past year encouraging user engagement.
LinkedIn has been particularly eager to push user-generated video. Members post short videos to give their take on an industry issue, announce new products and services, and demonstrate thought leadership.
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More video means more data, and LinkedIn is taking these new demands on its platform seriously.
“It is driving exponential growth in global site traffic demands and a corresponding increase in the demands made of our data centers,” wrote Zaid Ali Kahn, senior director of infrastructure engineering at LinkedIn, as he announced its decision to join the OCP.
The mission of the OCP, initiated by Facebook in 2011, is to make hardware “more efficient, flexible, and scalable” by deploying open standards developed by a “global community of technology leaders working together to break open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure,” according to its website.
“If every data center in the world were exactly the same, one solution would be fine, but this simply isn’t the case,” said Bill Carter, OCP’s chief technology officer. “Data center operators need options for both less-than-full-rack and rack-level deployment, while still delivering OpEx and CapEx savings.”
Carter said more details on LinkedIn’s involvement and contribution to the Open Compute Project would be announced at the OCP Regional Summit in Amsterdam in early October.
OPEN19 FOUNDATION
In addition to its OCP membership, LinkedIn will continue its involvement in the Open19 Foundation, launched in 2016 with founding members Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VaporIO to develop more efficient and flexible operating standards for data centers and edge computing solutions.
Ali Kahn said the implementation of Open19 standards in LinkedIn data centers was going well. “This technology deployment has proven very valuable as we’ve experienced 7X improvement in rack integration and an ability to install 4X the number of servers per rack,” he remarked.
LinkedIn’s announcement comes as it increasingly integrates its operating technology with that of its parent company Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.
DATA EXPLOSION
It’s hard to underestimate the rate at which the world’s data is growing. In its 2017 state of the market report, data storage leader Seagate projected a staggering tenfold increase in the size of “the global datasphere” between 2016 and 2025. That’s a cool 163 zettabytes to be exact, and that figure may prove to be on the low side.
What’s driving this astronomic rise in data generation is well established: the world has dramatically shifted online. The Internet of Things (IoT), the rise of machine learning, and the ongoing extent to which our everyday lives are intertwined with our smart devices have turned data into a hot commodity.
LinkedIn’s move signals a wider trend in which organizations far and wide gear up for a future that is overwhelmingly data-driven.
“If every data center in the world were exactly the same, one solution would be fine, but this simply isn’t the case.” – Bill Carter, Open Compute Project
