White Paper

WHITE PAPER Building an Agile Future mrcy.com 2 mrcy.com 2 The Open Compute Project and associated subprojects such as open edge are transforming the enterprise network and server market. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) can harness innovations from commercial and open community-based initiatives like these as part of their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) acquisition strategy to rapidly and affordably field enhanced capabilities in the battlefield. WHAT IS THE OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT (OCP)? Meta's swift ascension as a social media giant was not without its drawbacks: it created a reliance on vendor-specific, non- interchangeable and rigidly designed data center equipment. As one of the pioneers of the Open Compute Project (OCP), Facebook harnessed open hardware to transform its data center infrastructure. The company shared its server, storage, networking and hardware designs with the public, encouraging collaboration and innovation. This open-source approach allowed for rapid iteration of designs, resulting in more efficient, scalable and adaptable infrastructure. Today, OCP's transformational approach of applying open- source principles to server hardware is supported by major industry players such as Microsoft and Google and has reshaped how data centers are designed, built and managed. By rethinking the hardware and infrastructure stack and addressing these issues via common, modular and cost- effective architectures, IT organizations that adopt OCP technologies can better keep pace with changing business needs, a significant advantage as the demand for computing power and storage continues to grow. This thriving global community of companies and technologists has also expanded into numerous subprojects, including a telecom industry effort around edge computing called open edge. THE OCP OPEN EDGE SUBPROJECT As OCP pushes the boundaries of data center innovation, it is emerging into a new frontier: edge computing. As opposed to large equipment racks housed in physical buildings, edge networks bring data storage and processing as close to the point of use as possible and require low-latency and high- bandwidth performance. The open edge subproject aims to place computing resources at the source of data generation, reducing latency and enabling real-time insights from data. This effort has garnered contributions from diverse industry players such as Amazon, ASUS, Wiwynn and Mitac. Their unique perspectives and contributions are proving crucial in advancing the open hardware ecosystem and enabling high- performance architectures tailored for edge use cases. Because it leverages the expertise and resources of the OCP community and collaboration model, open edge is leading the development of standards for modular, scalable and ultrareliable edge computing infrastructure. This includes a modular and open architecture server chassis that can fit in tight spaces, requires minimal power and seamlessly works with a library of plug-and-play memory, processing and storage components from a variety of vendors. To encourage a unified vision for the future of edge computing, open edge adopters also share their physical constraints and their specification and design details within the community. This helps ensure that the standards are addressing a range of real-world needs and that telecom infrastructure is compatible, interoperable and capable of handling future demands — especially key as the number of edge-deployed servers is projected to double in the coming years

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