"Targeting" the Open Compute Project

Target (yes, that Target, the retailer) has an infrastructure and cloud conference, held last week. There CIO Mike McNamara (not to be confused with Cadence alumnus Michael "Mac" McNamara now CEO of Adapt-IP) announced that Target would join the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a platinum member (the highest tier).

I last wrote about OCP in my 2016 post Open Server Summit: How to Install 5,000 Servers Per Day and you might not know much, or even anything, about what OCP is. There is a good chance that the company you work for is actually a member, as is Cadence.

Here's a brief story of how Facebook started OCP a decade ago, from the OCP website:

In 2009, Facebook was growing exponentially, offering new services and giving millions of people a platform to share photos and videos. Looking ahead, the company realized that it had to rethink its infrastructure to accommodate the huge influx of new people and data, and also control costs and energy consumption.

That’s when Facebook started a project to design the world’s most energy-efficient data center, one that could handle unprecedented scale at the lowest possible cost. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing and building one from the ground up: software, servers, racks, power supplies, and cooling. It was 38% more energy efficient to build and 24% less expensive to run than the company’s previous facilities—and has led to even greater innovation.

In 2011, Facebook shared its designs with the public and—along with Intel and Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, and Andy Bechtolsheim—launched the Open Compute Project and incorporated the Open Compute Project Foundation. The five members hoped to create a movement in the hardware space that would bring about the same kind of creativity and collaboration we see in open source software.

The platinum top-tier members of OCP are the type of hyperscale and server companies that you would expect: Google, Baidu, IBM, HP Enterprise, Intel, Rackspace. And now, as announced on the OCP blog:

The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) announces today [April 7]  that Target Corporation is joining the OCP Community as a Platinum member. Target is the first major U.S. retailer to join the OCP. The announcement was made earlier today during ICCON, a new series of technical conferences and meetups hosted by Target to build and engage a community of engineers with the next infrastructure mindset.

Like every other retailer during the pandemic, a lot of Target's business has shifted online and it has had the usual challenge of scaling its data centers to cope with demand. In fact, it did this so successfully that it saw record growth in 2020. In fact, it has already leveraged OCP-certified hardware across its data centers, distribution centers, and stores.

But Mike pointed out one area that Target expects to drive OCP:

We are very excited to partner with the community on new use cases for networking and edge computing.

When I think of edge computing, I think of smartphones or even IoT devices. But in this context, Mike means the server setups that Target has in every store. Obviously, there is not on the scale of a hyperscale data center with enormous racks of thousands of servers, networking, and storage. But they do have server racks to handle a lot of the local activity in the store, such as point-of-sale (what we used to call cash registers), inventory, pickup logistics. As it happens, I attended a keynote by the CIO of Walmart who has a similar setup with local servers in each store to offload a lot of the processing that doesn't need to leave the building (but either I never wrote a blog post about it or I cannot find it). These servers are quite small by modern standards: "if you lose a blade it's a third of the capacity" he pointed out.

Mike gave more details:

What we can uniquely contribute to OCP is running edge compute. We've got 2,000 stores and each is a mini data center. That's a different environment than a data center. What we can contribute is how you can develop compute that's for the edge instead of the data center.

You can register for Target's ICCON for free, and can see Mike's (and everyone else's) full presentation on replay. The event itself is over.

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