Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/1036193
16 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com BRICKS AS CONTAINERS In the shipping world, there are uniform shipping containers for mov- ing cargo. In the soware world, there are containers for uniform shipping of soware. Yet in the server world, no uniform convention exists. e closest is a uniform platform that's 19" wide and has a 1.75" vertical U definition. Open19 aims to standardize it and defines a brick, the minimum ele- ment in the Open19 ecosystem, as a one-rack-unit, half-width server that can accommodate up to 100 Gbps of connectivity and 400W of power. Because Open19 is a scalable architecture that aggregates bricks to scale power and accommodate up to 100 Gbps Ethernet networks, bricks can be the size of a standard 1U server and have twice the power and network capability or be the size of a 2U server and have four times the available power (along with up to 400 Gbps Ethernet networking capability). e backplane connector set developed specifically for this architecture will also scale to 56 Gbps PAM4, versus the current 25Gbps NRZ signaling used for 25/50/100 Gbps Ethernet today. Each port can double the avail- able bandwidth as Ethernet silicon technology evolves. Additionally, bricks are com- pletely self-contained and standalone devices that carry all relevant safety and compliance certifications. ey dock into a sheet-metal chassis that provides the blind-mate power as well as the cableized backbone. e chassis comes in 8U and 12U variants, offering space for 16 and 24 bricks, respectively. Typically, a 1U power shelf and 1U Ethernet switch provide the supporting infrastructure to the bricks. THE POWER OF UNIFORMITY Consistent and uniform designs ease operational pains at scale. Any- one who has spent time at the back of a server knows the endless combina- tions of RJ-45, SFP and QSFP ports needed to juggle Ethernet connec- tions, not to mention that spending time with a high-cost remote hands- on technician can be stressful for both the technician and the staff working to resolve an issue. A leading provider of edge-compute and bare-metal clouds recognized this issue as it developed its edge-computing platform. e team immediately recognized the advantages of Open19: simple and uniform deployment of bricks. Each brick can only be inserted and mated in one direction. No external Ethernet cables to plug into the wrong port. Any available slot large enough for the brick can be populated. Operational complexity is reduced to near zero. THE PRICE OF POWER Power, power distribution and cooling amounts for 31% of the total operational costs of a data center at scale. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) measures the efficiency of power used for an IT load versus the amount con- sumed to support the infrastructure or lost during conversion, which occurs as power supplies change AC power to DC power. Power supplies oper- ate at peak efficiency when near their wattage rating. For example, a 400W load on a 500W power supply will experience less conversion loss than a 400W load on a 1,500W supply. A power shelf can reduce these conver- sion losses by dynamically enabling and disabling individual supplies in the shelf as the load demands. e accumulation of losses over hundreds to thousands of racks can amount to millions of dollars in operating costs. e power shelf in the Open19 design supplies 12V DC power to bricks and the Open19 network switch. e shared power shelf also uses a cabled power-distribution sys- tem, dispensing with the external DC bus bars that other systems employ. e power shelf also features a "uni- versal" input voltage from 100V to 277V AC. e universal design allows for implementation of a power cord specific to the deployment region, removing a large headache in deploy- ment logistics. BREAKING CONVENTION Rack-scale architectures offer the ability to break convention to solve problems holistically. e application of uniform elements allows system designers to provide value inside the compute bricks. ese bricks can dock inside a chassis that uniformly provides the power and network infrastructure. At scale, the TCO sav- ings from Open19 can be substantial. Edge-solution providers recognize the power of uniform designs and archi- tectural consistency. Operations can be make or break at scale. Open19 gives organizations an innovative rack-scale design by developing and deploying consis- tently sized hardware containers and bricks. rough the use of cableized backplanes, bricks can be developed to address several applications with varying power and network require- ments while also resolving operational issues at scale. An important consideration when evaluating a new architecture for data center deployments is the breaking of convention and integra- tion of uniform designs with cableized backplanes. e revised architecture allows you to focus on your business while easing many of the operational issues in large-scale deployments. About the Author: MD Truong is Director of Data Center Architecture at Molex.