Research Note

Abstract

LightCounting comments on highlights from OCP Global Summit 2021 The 2021 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit took place as a hybrid event during November 9-10, physically at the San Jose Convention Center and virtually. The OCP Summit is an annual event attended by key IT industry decision-makers, executives, engineers, developers, and suppliers. The primary focus of OCP is the data center industry, but it is expanding its reach into the telecom and edge infrastructure as well. The Summit marked its 10-year anniversary this year with reportedly 2,500 registered in-person attendees, plus thousands more virtually; the event’s theme was Open Possibilities. There were few topics that really stood out during this year’s show and expo: 1. Meta’s design of new OCP switches with key Ethernet switch players like Broadcom, Cisco, Arista, and Celestica. 2. Competition surge in the switching ASIC market enabled by Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI). 3. Insights into the AI hardware deployed at Meta and the backend optical networks supporting it. A lot of 200G and 400G transceivers will be deployed there. 4. World’s largest disaggregated router on display at the Expo. Meta (Facebook) and Google were the most active participants at OCP Summit 2021. The event also included speakers from Alibaba, Bytedance and Microsoft as well as representatives of Apple and AWS, offering a rare opportunity for leading Cloud companies to share their views in presentations, panel discussions and private meetings. LightCounting subscribers can access the full text of this research note by logging into their online accounts.