SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) and the HiWire Consortium today jointly announced that the HiWire Consortium standardization efforts will be absorbed into a new Interconnects Sub-Project inside OCP led by Don Barnetson, Vice President for AEC Products at Credo. All the Active Electrical Cable Specs were contributed to OCP and can be found on the OCP Contribution Database and the associated products are on display on the OCP Marketplace.
“The HiWire Consortium leads the inaugural effort to bring standardization to a new category of connectivity products – Active Electrical Cables (AECs),” said Sheng Huang, President of the HiWire Consortium. “As AECs move into the mainstream, we feel the broader umbrella of OCP will continue to accelerate standardization efforts and increase industry adoption.”
“Within the next five years, the 650 Group predicts AECs will take over 75% of server connections and displace chassis in hyperscaler data centers,” said Don Barnetson, Vice President for AEC Products at Credo and the OCP AEC project lead. “Standardization within OCP will further accelerate adoption among the hyperscalers and telecom service provider space.”
As a result of this announcement, OCP will have oversight for the ratified HiWire Specification v1.0, which was originally announced in 2020. The new AEC Project inside OCP will build on this specification by adding additional speeds, capabilities and test specifications as driven by OCP membership.
OCP’s members see AECs as a critical technology for their customers which include the world’s largest hyperscalers,” said Steve Helvie, Vice President of Channel Development for OCP. “The Community is excited to continue this standardization work and thanks to the HiWire Consortium for its pioneering effort to bring this revolutionary product to market with such broad industry acceptance. We're also very fortunate to have Credo as a certified OCP Solution Provider showcasing AECs on our OCP Marketplace, providing the Community a more comprehensive set of OCP solutions.
“Active Electrical Cables are key to enabling cloud infrastructure interconnect at the density, scale and ultra-low power required to meet our demands for the coming years,” said Gerald Degrace, Senior Director of Next Gen Technology, Microsoft. “As an active member of both the HiWire Consortium and OCP we’re excited by the synergies of standardizing AECs inside OCP’s broad industry scope.”
“Deploying a Distributed, Disaggregated Chassis (DDCs) paired with AECs is a simple fire & forget practice that improves network sustainability,” said Eli Moskovitch, Vice President of Operations at DriveNets. “The DDC ecosystem support for AEC enables frictionless buildouts of the world’s largest routers as required by our top-tier customer base.”
How to get involved:
For more details on this effort and the community around it OCP, please visit the Interconnects Sub-Project Page on the OCP website. You can view a complete presentation on AECs at the latest OCP Tech Talk Series here.
Subscribe to the Interconnects Mailing List here.
Join us for our next call: June 21st, 2022, 6pm PT. Call information can be found on the Interconnects Sub-Project Page under Calendar.
About the Open Compute Project
The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated by Facebook in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center’s networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. OCP’s collaboration model is being applied beyond the data center, helping to advance the telecom industry & EDGE infrastructure.
About the HiWire Consortium
The HiWire Consortium was founded by Credo and 25 other leading companies in 2019 to focus on creating a plug and play ecosystem of Active Electrical Cables (AECs) for the hyperscale and telecom industries. The HiWire Consortium membership grew to 46 companies and the v1.0 HiWire AEC Specification was ratified in November, 2021.