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What is open hardware? 

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure.

History of OCP 

A Case of Outgrowing traditional infrastructure. In 2009, Facebook was growing exponentially, offering new services and giving millions of people a platform to share photos and videos. Looking ahead, the company realized that it had to rethink its infrastructure to accommodate the huge influx of new people and data, and also control costs and energy consumption. 

That’s when Facebook started a project to design the world’s most energy efficient data centre, one that could handle unprecedented scale at the lowest possible cost. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing and building one from the ground up: software, servers, racks, power supplies, and cooling. The result now stands in Prineville, Oregon. 

It was 38% more energy efficient to build and 24% less expensive to run than the company’s previous facilities—and has led to even greater innovation. In 2011, Facebook shared its designs with the public and—along with Intel and Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim (founder of Sun Microsystems) – launched the Open Compute Project and incorporated the 

Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation. The five members hoped to create a movement in the hardware space that would bring about the same kind of creativity and collaboration we see in open source software. And that’s exactly what’s happening. With today’s exponential data growth, conventional proprietary hardware is increasingly struggling to support the pressure of industry demands. 

As a result, technology leaders worldwide began a movement of open source collaboration in a variety of data centre avenues — energy, design, infrastructure — to build nimble, adaptive, sustainable systems.

Their goal: 

To produce the most efficient, scalable data centre for the evolving market. 

ATLANCIS OCP Solutions are designed based on the SMART Principle with key benefits being:

  • Streamlined – OCP nodes and racks are designed specifically for data center and cloud functionality, meaning you only pay for what you need, while less points of failure within a system means less maintenance and down time. OCP is designed to be OPEX Optimized. 
  • Modular – Gone are the days of needing to buy purpose-built hardware which can sit idle during times of low use, which was the practice with legacy infrastructures. OCP uses modular building blocks to build out infrastructures, allowing for an unprecedented level of agility to respond to a variety of application needs. 
  • Application-Ready – ATLANCIS OCP Solutions can be configured and pre-validated with OS and software stacks to allow for a true plug and play experience upon deployment. 
  • Repurposable – Due to OCP’s inherently modular design, compute and storage resources can be quickly repurposed to respond near-instantly to changing application needs by simply changing the node-level or rack-level configurations. Less nodes remain idle as they can be easily repurposed for other, more demanding applications. 
  • Total Solution – Companies today don’t need just hardware, they need solutions. OCP combines the most efficient, agile and scalable hardware infrastructure with leading cloud and data center software to create real-world turnkey cloud and data center solutions. 

Products 

As Africa’s first OCP partner, Atlancis’ hardware expertise and direct ODM vendor alliances allow us to give you OCP solutions incorporating cutting edge innovation. You also get the solution faster – the open nature of an OCP platform makes it simpler and quicker to adopt new products than the conventional OEM route. 

Products that carry the OCP Accepted™ recognition comply 100% with an OCP accepted specification and the design files are open sourced and available. 

Products that carry the OCP Inspired™ recognition comply 100% with an OCP accepted specification and are available from a Gold, Silver or Platinum member of OCP. 

OCP Accepted™ or OCP Inspired™ products have been demonstrated and meet 3 or more of the OCP tenets-efficiency, openness, impact & scale. They can only be sold with warranty and support. 

Atlancis’ OCP Integrated Solutions enable companies to adopt proven solution stacks running on OCP Accepted™ and OCP Inspired™ hardware, thereby providing converged infrastructure solutions for the Enterprise. 

These managed offerings showcase a combination of software products, supporting different rack form factors. All OCP integrated solutions have proven support offerings including 3rd party product support to ensure efficient, reliable and scalable workload deployments. 

Circular Economy 

The Circular Economy is an economic approach to sustainability which minimizes waste and makes the most of IT assets. This approach focuses on developing products so they can be reused and repurposed with no residual waste.  

As the amount of hardware used in data centres continues to grow, OCP is committed to looking at ways to help reduce waste and embodied energy across all areas of the data centre infrastructure. 

OCP members have led this effort by creating integrated software solutions based on 2nd user OCP hardware, which enables enterprise companies and public sector organizations to quickly and economically evaluate, adopt and scale their infrastructure using proven hardware.