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The case against Open Compute Project Storage flotation

OCP-S caught in no-man's land between enterprise and hyper-scale

Interview Did you know there was a storage part of the Open Compute Project? If not, you do now.

The Facebook-generated OCP aims to make good, basic hardware available for data centres at low cost, with no bezel tax and no unwanted supplier differentiation justifying high prices. Its main focus is servers, but that's not all, as there is also a storage aspect.

The OCP-S project covers:

  • Cold Storage
  • Fusion-io
  • Hyve – "Torpedo" 2 x OpenU storage server that can accommodate 15 3.5″ drives in a 3 x 5 array
  • OpenNVM – Open-source project for creating new interfaces to non-volatile memory
  • OpenVault – 30 drives in 2U

These seem to be limited use cases; JBODs or disk drawers, flash and archive storage.

Web access via the hot links provided for each category is variable. Neither of the Fusion-io links for the specification and CAD models work.

The Hyve Torpedo storage specification download results in a "Page not found" error, as does trying to download the OpenVault v0.7 specification.

The cold storage specification download does work: you receive a 55-page PDF.

We haven’t heard much about OCP storage, and asked Nexenta CTO Michael Letschin what he knew and what he thought about it.

El Reg: What do you understand the status of the OCP storage (OCP-S) initiative to be?

Michael Letschin: While a work in progress, the lack of storage industry support means the OCP-S concept is still very much a pipe dream for all but the largest webscale companies. For customers to be considering the move, it’s fair to say that they will have to have taken the leap and embraced software-defined storage (SDS) as a starting point.

And, while the market traction for SDS is strong, it’s still early in the game – questions including what type of SDS, what the assumed system architecture is, and whether it’s scale-up or scale-out, need to be addressed.

When thinking about the status of any new initiative affecting the enterprise, it’s important to remember that for the conservative storage buyer, top of mind in any transition is "support". At the end of the day, support expectations on storage continue to be much higher than those on servers. When you have thousands of HDDs, you have to plan for HDD failures and know that they will be taken care of.”

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