Inspur is looking beyond hardware in its latest contributions to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Today at the OCP Virtual Summit, the company announced SONiC was coming to two white-box switches alongside SAP Hana certifications for its cloud-optimized rack hardware.

It's part of a larger effort to drive OCP members to think beyond the narrow, albeit lucrative hyperscale market and focus their efforts on adoptability, said Alan Chang, deputy general manager of Inspur's server product line. "This year Inspur has a very different agenda," he said, explaining that while OCP is great for hardware innovation and is filled with hard-working, do-it-yourself kinds of people, the technology isn't always easy to consume.

In the early days of the OCP, he explained that most companies were focused on innovation, especially in the hyperscale space where traditional enterprise hardware and form factors couldn't keep up with demand.

But the world is changing, driven by rapidly ramping broadband demands and the rise of compute-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. While hyperscale demands continue to climb, enterprise customers are now looking for options beyond the Dells and HPEs of the world, Chang said.

"A lot of customers are coming back and saying 'hey, I love this, but I just can't use it,'" he said. "It's like walking into a really fancy Ferrari car dealer, when you don't have the garage."

The problem, he explained, is the 21-inch form factor commonly used in hyperscale data centers won't fit in traditional enterprise server racks, and certainly aren't designed around enterprise demands. For this reason, Inspur began developing 19-inch versions of its appliances for use in enterprise applications.

One of its first, announced in collaboration with Intel a year ago, was the Inspur NF8260M5 server, which boasts a four-socket motherboard and Intel's Optane persistent memory. All of that is then packaged in a standard, two-rack unit (RU) chassis.

Chang said the availability of a four-socket server in a standard rack-mount form factor caught the attention of Chinese cloud provider Tencent, which reportedly purchased the platform in large volume. "If you make it right, there's going to be a high adoption," he said of the 19-inch form factor. "Because of the Tencent adoption we can lower the price for the general public."

However, the form factor, he explains still doesn't address the software problem.

Chang said one the problems customers face is they are hamstrung by the need to use hardware that's certified for the software they depend on. Right now, he said no one in the OCP community is talking about software certification, but changing that would dramatically increase adoption.

"And that becomes a challenge for a lot of smaller scale customers or clients," he said. "When it comes to enterprise IT they need to have have the certification in order to get support on the operating system level."

So, Inspur set out to get the aforementioned Inspur NF8260M5 server certified for use with SAP Hana so that customers could take advantage of the four-socket platform and Intel's Optane persistent memory.

Inspur this week announced its hardware now supports the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC).

The company joins a growing number of networking companies with switches based on the Linux-based network operating system, which was contributed to OCP in 2016 by Microsoft.

SONiC will power two white-box switches, the Inspur SC5630EL top-of-rack switch and the Inspur SC8661SL leaf and spine switch, which features hot-swappable interface cards. "We really want to elevate OCP from just the hardware itself," he said.

Finally the company today launched the Inspur Open Accelerator Interface (OAI) UBB system in a bid to speed the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators by hyperscale customers.

"Internet companies are struggling with AI's increasing hardware complexity, where integrating an AI accelerator takes six to 12 months," the company claims.

The OAI specification — developed by Baidu, Facebook, and Microsoft — attempts to unify the technical specifications of the accelerator module and while reducing the overall complexity of AI accelerator systems.

The end result is a system that is much easier and faster for customers to roll out.

Available in a 21-inch full-rack form factor, the OAI supports both hybrid cube mesh (HCM) and fully connected (FC) topologies.

“Inspur is committed to pursuing ongoing technology advancements that will drive the development of next-generation AI applications,” said Peter Peng, Inspur Group SVP.