Microsoft announced its 2nd-generation Open CloudServer (OCS v2) specification featuring a number of improvements in performance and flexibility. The first version of the spec was submitted to the Open Compute Project (OCP) in January, and the new version will be contributed to the community as well.
At this week's Open Compute Project (OCP) European Summit in Paris, Microsoft is showing OCS v2 designs with Quanta QCT, Wiwynn and ZT Systems.
Microsoft said development work on the OCS v2 spec centered around the diverse range of cloud services that it now supports. The OCS v2 design has been thoroughly tested in the comopany's own data centers, from powering IaaS and PaaS services in Windows Azure, to hosting e-mail and collaboration services in Office 365, to hosting latency-sensitive gaming services in Xbox Live.
A unified, flexible server design helps Microsoft to optimize the economics of its supply chain, while delivering a diverse array of cloud services from one underlying server platform. OCS v2 is also designed for deployment into any region or colocation facility around the world.
Highlights of OCSv2:
- A dual-processor design, built on Intel Xeon E5-2600v3 (‘Haswell’) CPUs, enabling 28 cores of compute power per blade, and reflecting Microsoft’s joint engineering collaboration with Intel to develop the next generation board.
- Advanced networking for low latency, high bandwidth, highly-virtualized environments, based on 40-gigabit Ethernet networking, with support for routable RDMA over Converged Ethernet (ROCEv2).
- Flexibility incorporated into the core design itself. This allows the integration of a variety of components and add-on cards, including FPGA accelerators, which enables customers to tune their servers for their own unique workloads.
- Low-cost, high-bandwidth, Flash-based memory support, incorporating the latest form factor for m.2 Flash memory. This allows OCS v2-based servers to incorporate higher-capacity SSDs, while ensuring TCO optimization by virtue of using cost-optimized NAND.
- A compact, high-capacity power supply, capable of delivering 1600 watts of power, with a high holdup time of 20 milliseconds.
- Support for high memory configurations, along with flexibility in the amount of memory deployed, by virtue of support for 128GB, 192GB, and 256GB memory capacity configurations.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2014/10/30/microsoft-contributes-next-generation-server-design-to-open-compute-project.aspx
