|
|
 |
Part 2
Last week was Part 1 of my interview with Takashi Watanabe, Senior Software Engineer at Actapio, Inc., and Hisa Tanaka, Director, Sales & Solution Engineering at ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America, Inc. In part 1 we discussed why they started to deploy OCP and how they overcame certain challenges in the supply chain.
This week in Part 2 of my interview we shift the focus to Actapio’s involvement in open source and their move toward AI. We also discuss the importance of having a strong OCP Solution Provider to help define strategy, delivery and support. The story of how they worked together during this pandemic to ensure a smooth supply chain to meet user demand is quite impressive.
Takashi
"My name is Takashi Watanabe. I am a manager and Senior Software Engineer at Actapio, Inc., where I oversee server infrastructure. I started my career at Yahoo Japan Corporation in 2010, working as a server engineer, and my duties expanded to focus on innovation and deployment of Linux as well as hardware platforms including OCP. I also develop software that supports our infrastructure operations. I was assigned to work at Actapio, Inc. in 2018."
Hisa
"My name is Hisa Tanaka. I am the Director of Sales and Solution Engineering at ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America which is an OCP Solution Provider (SP) across Asia and the US. I oversee both the business and technical side and I’m based in Silicon Valley. I've been working with the OCP since 2013 and set up the OCP SP relationship with the foundation to enable comprehensive services to new Open Compute adopters. We've been working with Actapio, Inc. from the beginning of their first adoption of OCP in 2015, and taking this exciting journey to bring their infrastructure to the next level."
Steve Helvie
"When I speak with organizations and enterprises about OCP they sometimes think they need a big team and they need to retrain all of their engineers. So, how difficult was it to train your team on this new hardware?”
Takashi
“There were differences between OCP and our traditional servers. But it didn't take much time to get used to OCP because of its ease of operation and optimized design. But, on the other hand, it was important to develop software that supports operations such as troubleshooting and identifying what components need to be replaced.”
Steve Helvie
“So it was more about training them on the software to identify what needed to be replaced? You have four people currently on your infrastructure team servicing over 7,000 OCP servers, that's a very impressive ratio of resources to servers. Does Actapio use a lot of open source software (OSS) to run on open hardware, and is open source a key strategy for Actapio in the future?”
Takashi
“Yes. We use a lot of OSS and we also try to contribute as much as possible to open source communities. We are currently working on contributing the software we developed to manage our OCP infrastructure.
Less training was required because of the operationally optimized designs. But, on the other hand, we had to build a software to automate or to enable people on-site to identify what components need to be replaced. Actapio actually spent time building software to operationalize OCP. We are thinking about open sourcing this software so that more OCP users can benefit. I am happy to share “MoxSpec” today as an example to democratize hardware ops at scale to reality.”
https://www.moxspec.io
Steve Helvie
“That's interesting. Yes, I think the Community would be very interested in hearing more about the software. Specific to networking, does Actapio currently use SONiC for networking?”
Takashi
“Yeah, definitely, the network team is looking at SONiC, but it’s still early in the evaluation and testing phase.”
Steve Helvie
“I know there is a growing demand for AI in many organizations. What is the AI strategy within Actapio?”
Takashi
“The demand for AI, machine learning infrastructure within Yahoo Japan Corporation is increasing rapidly and there are still a lot of areas that will see more innovations happen, such as Open Accelerator Modules (OAM). Actapio’s data center is mainly focused on training workloads within machine learning. Where there’s a need for big acceleration chips, today there are not many choices in this sort of training. Because they stem from both the chip perspective to zone factor perspective to accommodate more innovations happening within this machine learning infrastructure domain. So, we would like to incorporate something like that into Actapio’s data center in the near future for sure. From the perspective of operational efficiency and optimization, we are very interested in OAM. Maybe another area is different cooling technologies, such as liquid cooling. Currently we do 100% air cooling today, but we see that certain cooling technologies are becoming more innovative and that is something that Actapio would like to explore.”
Steve Helvie
“ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America has worked closely with Actapio since the beginning of their OCP journey. What role does ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America play in the deployment and the support in your organization?”
Hisa
“We support Actapio in three key areas. First, technology advisory. Secondly, solution architect, plus engineering, including supply chain management and thirdly, quality assurance.
I can give you a little bit more color into these three things. Acatpio and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America have been conducting market research such as key technologies, pricing trends, vendor communication, integration and logistics management. We've been working closely to really enable our joint OCP journey. This allows us to be successful in performing data center operations at scale to the next level. We’ve also been taking this journey with OCP members by participating in the OCP Community, talking with Facebook and other members in the Community to understand what people are working on and creating an executable strategy to bring Actapio’s data center to the next level as an infrastructure service provider. For example, the COVID-19 situation has had a significant impact on logistics management. However, prior to COVID-19 we had already created a risk management process together with Takashi’s team at Actapio. This is the value we bring to the partnership and understanding the OCP supply chain.”
Steve Helvie
“So even before COVID-19 you had already put together a risk management program?”
Hisa
“Yes, more precisely, we had a project to deliver 3,000 servers early in 2020. This project was kicked off back in March so the protocol was already in place prior to when COVID-19 began to worsen. Before the kick off we knew that things may happen and things could get worse so we developed the risk management process to monitor the entire supply chain. We talked with every single partner about the latest situation in their countries and where they have factories. There are logistics like air/flight reservations, transportation situations, and a lot of work and labor goes into it. We kept all the information updated in every database so that allowed us to capture and predict potential impacts that may occur to OCP delivery and implementation.
We actually re-arranged many things in a defined schedule and delivered everything on time by working together. This was because of the open relationship we had with key manufacturers that couldn't have been done if they would have not been an OCP solution. In traditional OEM style servers everything is pretty much black box and we wouldn’t be able to capture every single situation of partners, factory situations or anything. We would only get high-level information from traditional vendors in the type of situation. But because of this open community and relationships with all the ecosystem partners, we were able to monitor specific aspects of the OCP supply chain in more detail allowing us more visibility and flexibility when faced with uncertain times.”
Steve Helvie
“So being in an open community allowed you to do a better risk mitigation plan, that's very interesting.
Takashi, what advice would you give to a company who's starting to look at Open Compute and how would you recommend that someone start with Open Compute?”
Takashi
“It’s not only the operational efficiency that we enjoy about OCP, it’s about a lot of insights that you can get from being involved in OCP that allows us to push our data center operations and infrastructure to the next level. We strongly recommend trying OCP and comparing the performance and opex to your traditional servers. There are differences between OCP and traditional infrastructure, but members within the open communities can help you through the transition process. From our experience it’s important to utilize software to maximize the value that OCP creates and optimize your deployment. So please feel free to contact us if you are interested in our experience with OCP.”
Steve Helvie
“Hisa, you’ve worked with a lot of end users adopting OCP so what do you recommend? How do they start with Open Compute?”
Hisa
“I recommend talking to people like Actapio first. When we first adopted OCP we spent a lot of time speaking with OCP members like Facebook. By engaging with Community members, hearing their stories and experience it gives you a unique perspective you won’t get from vendors. At ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America we hear a lot from manufacturers and vendors, which is too product centric and not from the right audience. It’s the traditional way of reseller-vendor engagement. But because OCP is an open community it allows people to talk with other end users such as Actapio about their real experience without any ulterior motives.”
Steve Helvie
“That’s a great point Hisa, and I agree, end users in an open community do not have the same motives and are more willing to share the positives, negatives, benefits and obstacles.”
Hisa
“Right, so I had never seen this type of interaction before between the community and an end customer like Actapio. Prior to OCP we would usually have to be more from the vendor/provider side. But seeing those interactions between Actapio and Facebook, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America can be a provider that joins this discussion to help deliver the best solution. Being an OCP Solution Provider sets us apart in the crowded IT reseller market because we are providing community based solutions.
I would like to note that OCP is not for everyone. Open Compute is for people who really like to pursue operational efficiency, taking care of their servers on their own. They do care more about time rather than outsource spending to on-site support providers. They deploy at rack-level. They use software to build resilience, rather than depending on hardware reliability. So, Open Compute is not for everyone. If you take the time to hear the real story from companies like Actaptio, they are very willing to share their OCP experience. So I would recommend speaking with a current OCP user as a first step.”
Steve Helvie
“Great advice, Hisa. You're right that hearing from a current user provides an unbiased view.
I know that ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America has been in a really fortunate position to be one of our first OCP Solution Providers so you’ve seen the growth and challenges of OCP throughout the years. It's been interesting to watch how ITOCHU has continued to navigate the change and been so successful."
I would like to thank Takashi and Hisa for their valuable insights. ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America has also written about their experience deploying OCP with Actapio in more detail here.
If you would like to learn more about Actapio’s OCP infrastructure please contact me and I would be happy to introduce you. You can also view all the OCP related products offered by ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America on our OCP Marketplace here as well as fully integrated solutions based on OCP here.”
Takashi has over 10 years of experience in the IT industry. He has been responsible for the design, deployment, and operation of large-scale infrastructure as a server engineer, and continues to develop software for maximizing IT infrastructure efficiency. He is a proponent for the use and adoption of open-source hardware and software, and holds a Master in Computer Science.
Hisa Tanaka - Director, Sales & Solution Engineering at ITOCHU Techno-Solutions America, Inc.
Overseeing the US business growth out of Silicon Valley. Hisa spent the first 7 years of his career as SE for Telco to build the mobile Internet in Japan. After landing in the US, he has worked with many technology startups to bring innovation to reality, and a part of that was to set up an OCP SP partnership and the success with Actapio. He is a proponent of open technologies and believes operating expertise pioneered by internet giants, but translated to solve existing enterprise challenges, will bring industry to the next level.