Open Compute Project is the Open Source Server, Storage, and Rack Brand

Linux is the brand for Open Source Software.  There are many who have built on this brand to build their own open source brand.

Arduino is a an open source hardware solution for small eletronics prototyping.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

Photo by the Arduino Team

When you run a search for Open Source Server Hardware the Open Compute Project shows up as the top results.

 

The challenge for a project that is open source is what is its business model.  Just because the OCP is open source and non-profit doesn't mean they can exist without a business model.

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value

GigaOm's Stacey Higganbotham attended the Open Compute Summit and she discusses the business model of Open Source Hardware.

More infrastructure, more users, less money.

What’s occurring here is a shift in the value of a server, and thus of server makers. What used to be high-end machines with features driven by the engineers inside Dell, IBM, HP, etc., have now become a commodity, and not a Dell-like commodity either — a really low-end commodity. These servers are stripped-down machines custom-built by the guys who built Dell’s and HP’s boxes. The rise of manufacturers like Quanta has begun.

This rise was a direct result of the industry refusing to listen to the demands of its customers, especially because those demands didn’t seem to involve a way for the server guys to make much money. At first, Rackable, now called SGI, picked up on the business, but as Forrest Norrad, the VP of servers at Dell pointed out on Wednesday at the Open Compute Summit, Dell realized that companies like Facebook were not just one-off complainers. They were the leading edge of a new way of doing business– and IT was a fundamental element of that business.

...

Throw the server vendors a bone and let’s keep moving.

And here’s where the Open Compute Project comes in. Unlike DCS, which was a successful effort to serve the market once Dell had validated it, the Open Compute Project is a coup by the buyers of servers to take control of their hardware destiny. As such, I wondered if this coup would leave room for Dell or HP to continue to build their businesses. After attending Wednesday’s Open Compute Summit, I can say it seems like it will.

 Open Compute is still in the early stages, and it has the potential to be a brand in itself.

How I Attend a Conference is Tiring, allow for downtime

I've just spent two days at the Open Compute Summit and my brain is still decompressing from all the activity.

Everybody has a different style on how they attend conferences.  Some want to try and meet as many people as they can looking for the whales like the casino industry looks for the high roller.  This method is favored by many sales people.

Technology people are looking for newest SW and HW.

Out of 500 people attending the Open Compute Summit, I have 7 new business cards.   So, you can tell I  don't believe in the idea of having to work a room to build your rolodex.

I focused on talking to the influentials and the thought leaders.  People who I met for the first time, we talked about big ideas to see where they are at.  Some people I have known in e-mail or phone, but not met in person.  But, the vast majority of people i talked to where people I have met in the past, and we can exchange new ideas.

Now, some may attend to catch up almost like a reunion, but that is kind of limiting for me.  What is much more interesting is understanding how the ecosystem is working.  Who is there.  Who is not.  Who is talking to who.  Who is presenting and driving new ideas.  How things are changing vs. previous events.  How this event compares to others.  Then, you start to discover new patterns of ideas.  The ideas that are thought leaderships type.

On the plane trip out I watched Sherlock Holmes 2 and power of deduction has been morphed into almost superhuman powers.

Here is a well thought out 12 steps of How to Develop Sherlock Holmes Intuition.  I really like #10.

 

 

 

 

 Talk through your conclusion with a trusted person.

Talk through your conclusion with a trusted person. Holmes was a guarded person andtrusted people only when they had proven themselves trustworthy and loyal. In turn, those persons had Holmes' complete trust, such as Watson. By the same token, "nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.",^[13] so be sure to open up and talk through your conclusions with someone you do trust, to use them as a sounding board when you've worked through the deductions.

One of the things that makes a conference more enjoyable is having a partner, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, discussing analyzing, criticizing, exchanging ideas.  Olivier Sanche was one of those guys who was a partner.  And, at OCP i had a partner I trusted to discuss conclusions I had come to.  

After 2 days of intense analysis I especially like the last point.  Getting home it is family time, and we are getting a new ping pong table to play as a  family.

Plan downtime, party time, and leisure time into your life. Sherlock Holmes worked hard when sleuthing but he also loved his leisure and being languid.^[15] Deducing things and pushing your intuition to its limits can wear you down and rejuvenation is an essential part of ensuring that you continue to stay sharp, focused, and clever.

A Data Center Analyst walks into Open Compute Summit and says ...

A funny thing happened at the Open Compute Summit, one of the top data center/server analyst is chatting with the OCP staff.  One of his suggestions is OCP should charge for its events.  

The OCP staff asks why?  The analyst responds, well, we charge $1500 for our data center conference, thousands of people go, they leave happily fed with knowledge.  Compared to our conferences you actually learn more at OCP.  You can make a lot of money charging to attend the Open Compute Summit.

Huh.  Who would have thought. Maybe it was the alcohol.

Difficulty of being a Green Data Center

Some of data center crowd thinks they can be green in the data center with a LEED certification and a low PUE.

Greenpeace has not made these items as a criteria of who dirties the cloud.

One of the sessions yesterday at OCP was on environmental strategies and the data center.

I was sitting next to Stacey Higganbotham and she did a great job posting on this subject.

It’s not easy being green: Data center edition

By Stacey Higginbotham May. 2, 2012, 2:23pm PT No Comments

 

 
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Facebook’s Prineville data center.

Building sustainable data centers is hard — especially if you’re trying to do it in office space in Houston. Plus, the idea of operating some kind of power-generation plant for offering renewable energy such as solar or biogas is a scary prospect for data center operators. These were among the key takeaways (along with a few less-obvious lessons) from a panel on sustainable data centers at the Open Compute Summit held today in San Antonio, Texas.

Why write when Stacey already has? I'll just throw up some more pictures of the panel.

My Two Suggestions to make Open Compute Project better #OCP

I am probably one of the few attendees who has gone to all three OCP Summits in Palo Alto, New York, and San Antonio over the past year.  One of the benefits of attending all of them is I get to see how OCP is developing and how it could be better.

Being Open means the OCP is open to suggestions on how it can be better.  Many conferences/organizations that are organized around a rsearch analyst organization would not be as open and admit its mistakes in running its organization and events.  This is the strength of an an Open approach.

Suggestion #1

During the afternoon there were great educational sessions on environmental issues, supply chain management, and site selection. I sat in these sessions and they were quite good.  The disappointing part was how few people attended these sessions, even though the quality of speakers and content surpass what you would see at a data center conference.

Here is the Supply Chain Management and Site Management talk.

fbtechtalks on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

 

What I think is a problem is given the growth of OCP summits and how many people are new to the OCP process there should be an onboarding session for those who are brand new.

Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.^[1] Tactics used in this process include formal meetings, lectures, videos, printed materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs and organizations. Research has demonstrated that these socialization techniques lead to positive outcomes for new employees such as higher job satisfaction, better job performance, greater organizational commitment, and reduction in stress and intent to quit.^[2][3][4] These outcomes are particularly important to an organization looking to retain a competitive advantage in an increasingly mobile and globalized workforce. In the United States, for example, up to 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in an onboarding process.^[5]

The educational session is a good one, and the audience that most needs to be addressed are the new people to keep them engaged with OCP.  Address the new attendees as if they are new employess and develop an onboarding education series.

Suggestion #2

Late into evening party when things were quieting down a bunch of us were sitting together including Frank Frankovsky and we were discussing the OCP foundation.  Then I thought what is needed is a fresh look at how to educate the masses on OCP.  

How about if Facebook reached to Khan Academy's Salman Khan to create videos for OCP to explain what they are doing.

For those of you have not watched Salman Khan here is a video with Salman presenting at TED with Bill Gates as a guest.

How many more people would learn about data centers, servers, and the software that runs their services?

Now to give you an idea of the power of what Salman does, here is an excerpt of the transcript.

First the human interaction of a well done education video.

And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened --actually a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins.They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first, it's very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time, the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room.

Second is open up the content. share it.

The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world. And these are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. And someone wrote just on YouTube -- it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." (Laughter) And let's pause here. This person did a derivative and then they smiled. And then in a response to that same comment -- this is on the thread. You can go on YouTube and look at these comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day. Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'"

So my two suggestions to OCP are to 

1) Have a session for onboarding at OCP events

2) Use Khan Academy as a fresh view to explain what OCP is, create videos, and educate the masses.