Inspur is a China-based company that manufactures servers and develops software. According to Gartner, Inspur was the No. 3 server vendor in the world for the first quarter of 2018, behind Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), respectively. Its biggest customers are Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

Today, Inspur announced some Open Compute Project (OCP)-standard nodes to help drive the transformation of data centers based on open infrastructure. Inspur made its announcement at the 2018 OCP regional summit in Amsterdam, Holland.

Inspur’s contributions include a GPU box, a JBOD storage device, and three compute nodes, which provide increased density within the constraints of server racks.

The three new compute node configurations are based on Inspur’s San Jose Motherboard, which Inspur donated to OCP in 2017. It’s the first OCP-accepted Intel Xeon Scalable processor motherboard. “The San Jose motherboard can fit into very high density, both 1OU height or 2OU height,” said Dolly Wu, general manager of data center and cloud at Inspur. “Currently in the industry, the standard Facebook motherboard fits only in a 2OU. The San Jose can fit it both 1OU and 2OU.”

For storage, Inspur donated its 2OU JBOD 34 hard drive. “Currently, the OCP storage form factor can accommodate 30 drives,” said Wu. “Ours can accommodate 34 drives. Four more drives is actually a big deal. There are a lot of terabytes you can add into a 2OU form factor.”

Finally, Inspur contributed its graphical processing unit (GPU) box, which can accommodate 16 GPUs in one 4OU box. “This is the highest density in the industry,” said Wu. “GPU pooling is critical so that you can optimize utilization. GPU is extremely expensive. You don’t want GPU to sit idle.” She said the GPU pooling can maximize the customer’s investment by pooling GPU resources for continual use.

Wu said Inspur is the only vendor in the world that participates in all of the open hardware platforms. It is a platinum member of OCP, which was started by Facebook in 2011. And it’s also very involved with a similar group in China called the Open Data Center Community (ODCC), which was started by Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. “Currently, Inspur is the leading provider for ODCC deployments, capturing over 60 percent of the market share,” said Wu.

In addition, Inspur is involved with Open19, a group created by LinkedIn. And it also supports Rack Scale Design by Intel, a software-defined data center tech.

“We want to help the OCP community increase adoption,” said Wu. “Right now, Facebook is the primary user of OCP, along with some telecom companies and some financial companies. When you look at OCCD, it has very large adoption across industries, many types of industries. We want to help the OCP community to make it easier for different industries to adopt OCP technology.”