| | November 20158CIOReviewopinionin myloud computing is rapidly transforming the IT industry, and has gained significant momentum over the past few years across both consumer and business segments. Enterprises are accelerating their investments in migrating application infrastructure from discrete environments to services-based delivery model using IaaS/PaaS/SaaS paradigms. While there is a lot of focus on the software aspects, what is less discussed is the equivalent rapid transformation taking place in IT infrastructure across the hardware supplier ecosystem, being primarily shaped by the large hyper-scale public cloud providers and recent trends in open source hardware.The Open Compute Project (OCP) was established in July 2011 to enable the broad availability of extremely efficient server, storage and datacenter hardware designs optimized for large scale computing. The aspired result is to provide end users with the choice and flexibility for designing the infrastructure stack using open source hardware building blocks, without being beholden to any legacy or vendor defined constraints. This is achieved by disaggregating the proprietary vendor stack into independent components to enable a greater degree of flexibility, scalability and efficiency. Most of these components are based on commodity hardware utilized in hyper-scale deployments, ensuring that IT end-users can leverage industry learnings from operating at scale, while still being able to take advantage of lower costs from volume pricing. OCP Solution Providers (SPs) perform the typical order fulfilment and service/support functions, by taking the hardware and software building blocks and configuring these based on the IT customer's solution requirements. The OCP community now has over 150 member companies across the globe, and is backed by prominent hyper-scale cloud providers, OEM/ODM suppliers, silicon providers and IT end users. Design and IP contributions from member companies across the hardware and solution stack have enabled OCP to establish itself By Kushagra Vaid, GM, Server Engineering, MicrosoftIndustry Trends in Open Sourced CHardwareOCP Solution Providers (SPs) perform the typical order fulfilment and service/support functions, by taking the open source hardware and software building blocks and configuring these based on the IT customer's solution requirements Kushagra Vaid
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