 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the leading newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Joe Maxlima and joining me today in London I've got Steve Helby, the Vice President of Channel Development for the Open Compute Project Foundation. Steve, thanks for joining us. How are you doing? I'm doing well, Joe. Thank you very much for having me. Cool. And Steve, let's start with a brief introduction of yourself and the Open Compute Project Foundation. Just guide us through what you do and what the organization is. Sure. Well, I'm part of the team at the Open Compute Project and Open Compute Project or OCP is a technical nonprofit foundation focused on the data center itself. So it was started in 2011 by Facebook and at that time, Facebook was outgrowing their infrastructure. So they were out to solve the next wave of problems and they were going to build their data center from the ground up. And when they started to do that they asked themselves questions like what can we get rid of? Can we do things differently? Can we run the servers hotter? Can we get rid of some things in the data center? And when they solved those problems with their particular vendors and manufacturers, they took it a step further and they open sourced those designs across server storage networking, even the facilities. And there they created the Open Compute Project Foundation or OCP along with Microsoft, Intel, Goldman Sachs and Rackspace. And today we're over 200 companies working across 25 different open source hardware projects in the data center and around 8,000 engineers across those projects working on problems within the data center. That's super interesting because usually we have these for you that hyperscalers are not very good at sharing their own best practices. So opening up the data center, the infrastructure and even the software side is quite interesting. But before we delve into what the organization does as well, what trends do you see in the European data center space, especially many around open hardware or even open source? Yeah, I'm coming at this again, Joe, from the from the open hardware standpoint. So there's a there's a few things that we're seeing in the community. And I would say the first that comes to mind is around advanced cooling. Racks are becoming more dense. So people are running heavier workloads, HPC, AI type of workloads, increasing the power usage that's needed within the rack. So there's a group within open compute that's focused on advanced cooling facilities and of course immersion has been around for many, many years, but now it's really jumping to the forefront across immersion cold plates, door heat exchangers. This group is is doing a lot of different things in the immersion and the advanced cooling solution. So we're seeing that translate into the facility itself where we have facilities coming to us. And we get ready for the next wave because they want their new build or their retrofit of a current data center to handle both air and advanced cooling solutions to attract a particular type of clientele moving forward. So this is the first thing the second, I would say is is I know that you've had guests on in the past talking about sustainability. That's certainly moving toward the toward the forefront of what we're talking about as well. So there's a lot of different initiatives around the climate climate data center neutrality pack, which I know that you recently had a guest on speaking about that. We have a lot happening around the circular economy so the way that we're approaching this is not only at the hyperscale level but what do the hyperscale hyperscalers decommission, and then how can we take that hardware, repurpose it into the second user market, and so we have partners that are taking the decommissioned hardware coming out of the hyperscalers, sanitizing it, putting additional workloads on it and then moving it out at scale at tier one or tier two customers around the world. And one of the things that we'll be doing in the in the future is focusing on the firmware so one of the inhibitors of being able to take this and reuse hardware is around the firmware itself a lot of firmwares proprietary. In our group we're working on open systems firmware on the front end to design hardware for the second use lifecycle so a lot of hyperscalers are involved in making sure that when they sit down with the manufacturer when they design a server. It's ready for the afterlife and the second use of that server not just what's best right now and then let the let the decommissioner or the itad players deal with the hardware after the fact. The second the third is certainly around edge so we're seeing edge propagate across many workloads. We're seeing it in the modular data center form. We actually had in customers or end solution providers put together full containerized second user OCP hardware to put near medical facilities for telehealth or for critical reporting needs. And then we've seen the telcos put all of their edge central offices in different use cases. And that's a big big area for open infrastructure is on the edge side. And we're seeing some pretty interesting edge use cases around heat reuse where they've taken the modular data center, using it at the edge near the greenhouse taking that heat reuse to heat the greenhouse. And then of course all the hyperscalers are now working with district heating systems as well to heat local towns with the heat reuse so heat reuse is quite big. And then I would say the last trend is around the importance of open communities. I think that the in the last six to 12 months I would have more data center facility operators. So let's talk about how they're getting involved in certain communities, and the importance that those communities play in driving their in business because they get access to customer viewpoints before the customer demand hits their facility and I'll give you a couple of examples. So this is the open networking foundation. So it's another open source organization focused on carrier grade software. So they're working with the likes of Deutsche telecom and telephonic to develop software that then it's going to be open. It's going to ride on their edge equipment in central offices that's going to really impact the way that that facility is structured. And then of course OCP is another organization. We have another great organization here in the UK called open UK, and they have three pillars around legal policy and community, and they're driving open standards across both 5g efforts and data center as well. And then lastly, more of a regional group would be more like Guy X where an entire dependency or regionality group becomes focused on open standards. That's open data, open infrastructure, open hardware to really give that transparency needed for local cloud providers. And that's a lot of food for thought that I mean guy X alone, it could be a whole video series. I mean I like some things that you mentioned you mentioned you mentioned climate you mentioned scalability you mentioned open communities, more collaboration. What would you still say, as some of the biggest challenges they still face within those topics that you just mentioned, for example, is it certain people education, educating the market. Could it even just be really just the lack of open communities like you said, what like the main pain point they used to face as OCP as well. There's, there's a few barriers one is change. So it's a new way of doing things people are a little bit always resident resident on hesitant on that. However, when you're speaking about open source people are comfortable with open source software they know how that works. When it comes to opening up their hardware designs, they're nervous they're nervous they're going to be copied there's IP associated with that. So it does take a lot of education to understand that you're not giving up IP when you open source your hardware designs, but you're working within a community so there's a great deal of education, taking in into effect. The other is the heavy weights of the incumbent. There, there's a lot of large incumbent players in the data center industry that have made their, their living and their company revenue streams based on legacy proprietary hardware and equipment, and that is still prevalent so the idea of moving people into an open source mind shift is a huge, huge challenge. And then I would say the last is resourcing. We've got teams out there if I'm a let's say I'm a large enterprise and I've got maybe 10 people on my team for the year well how do I allocate those 10 resources. Maybe next year I only have eight. So do I spend those people do I spend that time educating those people on a new way of doing things, or do I take three of them, put them on something they already know legacy type of way of doing things, and then stick more on public cloud offerings. And there's my resources so there's, there's a resource constraint in a lot of these enterprises, not it's not so much at the hyperscale, they've got tons of people, a lot of resources they do everything themselves. But we're talking about the enterprise level on down. Just out of curiosity, what's the reaction or the. What's the reaction from finance investment banking institutions, because usually those guys are quite skeptic about anything to do with infrastructure, if they don't control it fully. You mean the, the financial services industry itself and adopting open hardware. Yes, and even back institutions. So on the final side of things. I've seen it in two different ways one is fintech is very aggressive, because a lot of their applications are cloud native so when you started your business on the cloud. You are much more open, because you're most likely running open source applications, open source applications, the move to open hardware is a pretty, it's a pretty natural move. So traditional style of banking, they've maybe went through a lot of acquisitions, there's a lot of legacy hardware, a lot of legacy applications there, and it's really difficult, and a lot of these people aren't running their own data centers they're there in Colo spaces and they're, they're one of many tenants they're not even a wholesale tenants, they have very limited constraints. So one of the things about open compute is that if I'm deploying at a rack scale to get some of the benefits, it's great to have the OCP optimized design within the data center, whereas in some of these colos, it's just not possible which is one of the areas we're working on now is helping colos make that transition to accommodate for open hardware. So I see a lot of movement in a fintech and then divisions of traditional banking are moving toward this way. Okay, that was just like out of curiosity because we always know that sector is a bit more reluctant. But I mean, the end of your answer kind of leapfrogs me into my next question. What are you going to be working on throughout 2021 and 2022. Just know yourself also the organization so the OCP. What are you guys going to be working on over the next 24 months, let's say, in a world of COVID as well. Yeah. The technical steering committee have outlined is as big deals for 2021. The first being security. So in the past, it's been very this the root of trust. When you make a particular piece of hardware all the way to through to the time it lands in the data center, who manages the firmware who's been able to touch that gear. And that's all been a little bit fragmented in the world of ODMs or straight from the manufacturer to the data center. So our security group is very focused on developing the root of trust. And to help identify a chain of making sure that when people get a piece of hardware they can they can manage that root of trust and identify that so security will be across every single one of our projects, which is a pretty big initiative. I, an ML workloads and how that transitions into the facility and I mentioned that at the beginning with the advanced cooling solutions, moving into the advanced cooling facility, and how that handles AI and ML workloads sustainability, which I've touched on as well. We have a group of, of at least a dozen companies with an open compute focused on circular economy, and what that actually means both at the development side early on, all the way through to second use. And then the last is integrated solutions so one thing that we found is that people like the idea of doing things themselves however they also like the idea of capitalizing on best practices used throughout the community so we're working on full stack integrations. And that could be instance based being hosted a particular fill facility, partial rack full rack deployments. So those are four or so the key initiatives, heading into 2021. Okay, Steven, one final question. If you had to describe the open hardware market in Europe in one word what words, would you, would you choose. It's a good question, Joe. Um, so is the one word. One word. Exciting. It's exciting to see the people that have made the move, see the benefits, and then I'm extremely I'm extremely excited about the number and the types of companies that are starting to take a look at this type of hardware. Yeah, and I mean I'm based on everything you just said as well. There's a lot of good topics then there's a lot of transformation happening and seems to be in the right direction, especially on climate change. Steve, thank you so much for talking to us. And thank you our viewers for watching day say TV and JSA podcast and don't forget to also check our social media channels. Until next time, happy networking.