That's bad news for established server vendors like HP and Dell, and it could well be the reason that HP has felt the need to launch its own, proprietary high density computing solution in the form of Moonshot.
Moonshot is unlikely to appeal to very large organisations like Facebook or Google that have hundreds of thousands of servers running in their data centres and the resources to support and manage generic OCP servers, but it may strike a chord with organisations that have a few thousand servers in their data centres, according to Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester Research.
"If you buy OCP servers from a supplier in Taiwan you get little or no support. You would also have to license a third party management system or use an open source management stack and figure it out yourself or pay for support," he says.
Higher utilisation
A major trend in enterprise computing over the last few years has been towards server virtualisation, and one of the biggest drivers for this has been a desire to increase server utilisation rates. Moonshot increases utilisation rates in a different way, by slimming each physical server down to just the level that's required for its workload.
The benefit is that Moonshot customers can avoid the virtualisation processing overhead, virtualisation software licence fees, and the additional virtualisation management layer, says Fichera. "If you have lightweight workloads that you don't want to virtualise, then Moonshot is a very valid high density platform," he adds.
Other benefits of Moonshot could be the energy efficiency of the cartridges and that it gives companies the ability to scale out their operations without needing significant power and space upgrades. But whether these companies will want to be tied to a single vendor for their servers and the chassis that support them remains to be seen.
SMB appeal?
Views differ on whether Moonshot will appeal to small and midsized businesses. HP's Morgan says it will, but Fichera disagrees, arguing that the small number of companies of this size that need a high density computing infrastructure are more likely to turn to co-location facilities (or even the cloud).
"Maybe it would interest smaller companies if they brought out a chassis with both servers and storage servers so it was like a data centre in a box, but HP don't have any plans to do that," he concludes.
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