Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) emerged as a category of Data Center and Edge infrastructure a few years ago. Western Digital’s first product to be introduced into the CDI space is OpenFlex™ F3000, with which systems can be composed dynamically by carving out resources from disaggregated hardware pools, and then connecting those resources with a fabric. Our fabric of choice for CDI is Ethernet, which is arguably the most ubiquitous and cost-effective networking technology of today’s Data Centers. That is one of the main reasons why our NVMe-oF™ products are Ethernet based.
The current generation of our NVMe-oF products supports NVMe™/RoCE, and NVMe/TCP will soon be supported as well.
Open standard technologies rely heavily on well thought-out specifications that are built for interoperability. However, no specification is perfect! The more layers involved in the specification, the more room the specification has for ambiguity, corner cases, and intricate patterns of dependency. NVMe-oF and CDI are no exception to that.
The Open Composable Compatability Lab (OCCL) was founded as a vendor-neutral lab to promote interoperability across fabric attached devices in an Open Composable ecosystem. OCCL defines a set of compatibility test suites that are developed to help customers confidently select products that work well together. OCCL is intended to provide an open environment to debug interoperability issues.
As the industry continues the journey of building fabric attached products, OCCL will work with standardization bodies to ensure standards are streamlined, comprehensive, and interoperable, using the learnings from open composable standards and products.
OCCL is currently based in Western Digital’s Colorado Springs facility.
