Who’s Buying OCP Gear Outside of Facebook and Microsoft (FB)
Sales of servers, networking switches, storage, peripherals, racks, power infrastructure, and other data center gear based on Open Compute Project designs generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2017, or less than 1 percent of the $137 billion data center hardware market, IHS Markit estimated in a study of the OCP market commissioned by the OCP Foundation. That’s not counting OCP hardware bought by Facebook, Microsoft, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs, the four end-user companies with OCP board seats. Servers were responsible for 75 percent of the revenue. The analysts expect the “non-board” market to reach $6 billion in 2021, growing at an average annual rate of about 60 percent. Non-board hyper-scale companies and “tier 2” cloud providers bought the most OCP gear in 2017. Each of the two categories was responsible for about 30 percent of the market last year. (IHS defines “hyper-scale” as companies with more than 3 million square feet of data center space total.)