OCP Global Summit 2023

This year, the OCP Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit—held in San Jose, California, from October 18 to 20—marked its 11th anniversary, with a record number of attendees from a very diverse set of companies that are either supplying the technology or consuming it; such as cloud providers, colocation providers, telco providers, and enterprises. We very much enjoyed seeing in person the many clients of ours who were present.

Before zooming in on the technology segment that is close to my heart, networking, I would like to share some overall observations about the show.

First, it is worth noting that when OCP started more than 10 years ago, it was mostly centered around Meta (formerly known as Facebook). Microsoft and Google joined in 2014 and 2016, respectively. This year, the number of contributions and talks presented by Google was remarkable, as will be discussed in other blogs.

Second, the number of topics explored during the summit was significantly greater than was the case for prior events. It’s no longer just about compute, storage, and networking. This time, we heard about accelerators, CXL memory, rack and power supplies, data center facilities, optics, security, among other topics. We also heard for the first time about sustainability. That is because the slowing of Moore’s Law is hindering improvements in CPU performance, power consumption, memory, and storage cost efficiencies. Innovation at other layers of the stack is therefore needed in order to circumvent this slowdown.

At Dell’Oro Group, we track many of the areas covered at the OCP conference. In a series of future blogs, you will hear from my colleagues Baron Fung (who tracks servers, storage, and data center capex) and Lucas Beran (who tracks data center physical infrastructure) about their key takeaways from the show.

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