Show notes
Andrew Ruthven, aka “Puck”, is a Data Centre Manager at Catalyst IT, a New Zealand open source specialist IT company whose services include operating an OpenStack based public cloud. This episode is based on “Open Compute Project, down under”, a talk that Andrew gave at OpenStack Sydney, which had the following abstract:
This talk will review the Open Compute Project, where it came from, where things are now and where things are headed. We will cover benefits that Open Compute Project hardware provide over the typical server hardware that we’re used to. We will discuss how it works for the large scale operators, and the issues that affect the small scale operators from the perspective of a small scale operator.The discussion begins with an introduction to the Open Compute Project (OCP) and its history and motivations. Andrew covers challenges in bringing the Open Compute Project to New Zealand, which included setting up supply and support chains for the hardware. More relevant to our podcast focus, in addition to servers, OCP includes hardware for “white box” switches and access points, and Andrew talks about how those work and how they fit into a data center infrastructure. Andrew also talks about the future of OCP and SDN at Catalyst and in New Zealand. Toward the end, we digress into a side discussion of how, on the commercial side of the industry, hardware is becoming more and more open, with OCP as an example, whereas on the consumer side, hardware is becoming more and more locked down, and Andrew and Ben offer their thoughts on the situation. You can find Andrew on Twitter as @puck_. To find out more about Open Compute Project, visit the project website. OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.