Facebook VP of infrastructure discusses Open Compute Project adoption by telecommunications industry
SAN JOSE, California – Jason Taylor, Facebook VP of infrastructure and Open Compute Project Foundation chairman and and president, kicked off the Open Compute Summit by touching on adoption in the telecommunications industry.
“These are the companies that need to invest in infrastructure in order to just exist, be efficient, in order to just do their business,” Taylor said. “The acceptance of OCP from the telecommunications industry is a particularly important sign of momentum for the community. This is another industry where infrastructure is core to the business. Hopefully we’ll end up with a far more efficient infrastructure.”
Last month the Open Compute Project spun off the Telecom Infra Project, which is focused on communicating telecom technical requirements to the OCP community; looks to strengthen the OCP ecosystem to address the deployment and operational needs of telecom operators; and aims to bring its work to telecom data center infrastructure to provide increased cost savings and agility. Inaugural members include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, EE, SK Telecom and Verizon Communications.
Taylor said the Telecom Infra Project is “complementary to OCP, but it focuses far more of the challenges of software and hardware for wireless access networks and wireless backhaul. Given that different focus, we needed a different approach. OCP welcomes TIP to the community.”
In joining OCP, AT&T said with its stated goal of controlling more than 75% of its network with software architecture by 2020, it’s looking for innovation support in terms of driving telecom needs into data centers.
“We’re becoming a software and networking company,” explained Andre Fuetsch, SVP of architecture and design at AT&T. “As a result, our central offices are going to look a lot more like data centers as we evolve our networking infrastructure. The Open Compute Project is innovating rapidly in this area, and we’re thrilled to be collaborating with the community of engineers and developers that are driving the evolution. We look forward to our vendors and other industry players supporting this initiative, as well.”
“I feel a tremendous sense of momentum … as we move beyond just hyperscale into finance and telco,” Taylor said, adding that the Open Compute Project is “all about making data center infrastructure more efficient, flexible and scalable.”
