Open Compute Project Networking, with Andrew "Puck" Ruthven from Catalyst IT

Andrew Ruthven, aka “Puck”, is a Data Centre Manager at Catalyst IT, a New Zealand open
source specialist IT company whose services include operating an
OpenStack based public cloud.

This episode is based on “Open
Compute Project, down under”, a talk that Andrew gave at OpenStack
Sydney, which had the following abstract:

This talk will review the Open Compute Project, where it came from, where
things are now and where things are headed. We will cover benefits that
Open Compute Project hardware provide over the typical server hardware
that we’re used to. We will discuss how it works for the large scale
operators, and the issues that affect the small scale operators from the
perspective of a small scale operator.

The discussion begins with an introduction to the Open Compute Project
(OCP) and its history and motivations. Andrew covers challenges in
bringing the Open Compute Project to New Zealand, which included setting
up supply and support chains for the hardware. More relevant to our
podcast focus, in addition to servers, OCP includes hardware for “white
box” switches and access points, and Andrew talks about how those work
and how they fit into a data center infrastructure. Andrew also talks
about the future of OCP and SDN at Catalyst and in New Zealand.

Toward the end, we digress into a side discussion of how, on the
commercial side of the industry, hardware is becoming more and more open,
with OCP as an example, whereas on the consumer side, hardware is
becoming more and more locked down, and Andrew and Ben offer their
thoughts on the situation.

You can find Andrew on Twitter as @puck_. To find out more about Open
Compute Project, visit the project
website.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.