David Floyer (L) and John Furrier at the Open Compute Summit

Microsoft rocked the cloud and hyperscale world when it joined the Open Compute Project at Open Compute Summit V on Tuesday, writes Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer in a recent article entitled “Microsoft Joins OCP and Contributes Cloud Management Software and APIs.” Microsoft contributed complete server and storage designs and donated the software code it uses for managing hardware operations to the Open Source community.

This gives OCP multiple additional hardware specifications covering search, communications, and general purpose computing and, most important, an API that will connect hardware layer management to the software-led infrastructure layer. Microsoft, Floyer says, was motivated by its belief that creating open standards will help accelerate the growth of mobile cloud, public cloud and enterprise private cloud and drive economies of scale. It hopes this will help it in its competition with Amazon and Google in cloud computing, as well as application and infrastructure revenues.

The other major Summit event was the demonstration of provisioning server configurations using a combination of OCP and OpenStack by a company called IO located in Phoenix. This, Floyer writes, makes OCP the favorite in the competition to become the de facto standard for the hyperscale open source hardware market, particularly for cloud providers and data center service providers. This will only increase the speed of the growth of hyperscale computing, allowing globally connected mega data centers to provide traditional outsourcing, private and public clouds for enterprise IT, cloud service providers and data brokers. By moving this data as close as possible to data from mobile, social and Internet of things services it will facilitate extraction of the greatest business value from the combination of all data sources.

Floyer’s advice to CIOs: “Cut investment to zero for the expansion of current data center space and develop a data-led topology based on services located in global mega data centers.”

Floyer’s Alert, along with all his research and that of the entire Wikibon community, is available publicly on Wikibon.org. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community. This allows them to communicate with their peers, participate in Wikibon research, and post questions, comments, and their own research on the site.