The Zettastructure will have to be open, if it is to adapt to the demands of growing requirements on infrastructure, Peter Judge and Cole Crawford agreed in a White Space extra at the DCD Zettastructure event. And the process to develop this infrastructure is having to change.

”We are now having conversations about things that didn’t get spoken about last year,” said Crawford. ”Things like edge, 5G, security and application performance, form the opposite side of the rack. The rack has been no-man’s land since forever, but now there is a convergence of the conversation, between facilities and the cloud.”

With Microsoft Olympus, the process of openness has moved on from being about open designs to an open process to create those designs. It’s a bold move, but suppliers now have to invite people to help build their hardware. 

In a similar vein at the event, Open Compute presented its work so far, but also had discussions about what it should be doing in future. 

The conversation also gives a glimpse of the wilder ideas that emerged in DCD’s Big Ideas panel.