Getting manufacturer and data center owners onboard has been an interesting process — and, depending on which company you’re talking about, an uphill battle.
“Since the Open Compute Summit [in January 2013], the Summit has informed some of the suppliers about the challenges, specifically around disaggregated design and cold-storage design,” said Frankovsky.
“We put a vision out there, and we had some proof points, and it’s been really cool how many suppliers were energized and kickstarted a whole ‘nother wave of activity.” In this way, Open Compute gives data center and server suppliers a clear idea of what’s new and what’s coming down the pike in large-scale computing; it also lets them know what their biggest customers are going to be asking for next.