Open Hardware, Meet Open Data
Jon Baars
Data Center Energy Efficiency in Open Networks
The Open Compute Project (OCP) transforms how the data center industry thinks about hardware openness. OCP open hardware standards enable lower costs, vendor flexibility, energy efficiency best practices, scalability, modularity, and more. The logic is clear.
We're convinced that there is a similar parallel data track that should be paired with these open hardware standards for managing data center energy usage. We have multiple production examples where we are using modern open-source data streaming tools to gather and standardize 30k+ energy metrics per minute in data center environments across a wide-range of equipments classes and vendors. Over a billion records per month.
Similar to the logic behind OCP standards, the data standardization methods we're employing are decoupled from specific hardware and software vendors. These standards can be used in any current modern data center design you have, but also be applied retroactively to any past designs you have as well, standardizing data across all your infrastructure.
The data, by itself, has a lot of value. You can accumulate billions of telemetry points using open-source data streaming tools that are low risk, can be layered on top of all your existing processes, and are very cost-effective.
Open-source data streaming and monitoring tools help operators turn raw hardware telemetry into standardized, real-time data streams — ready for analytics, billing, or AI.
This approach allows you to:
⚙️ Integrate multi-vendor hardware without lock-in
⚡ Build unified energy dashboards and billing systems
♻️ Drive sustainability and ESG reporting from actual vs. estimated data
🤖 Build your own data sets to prepare for AI-driven optimization
If you’re part of the OCP community working on power, telemetry, or energy efficiency initiatives in data centers, we’d love to compare notes. We'd really like to match our method with the telemetry output of GPU's. If you have a means of testing this, let's talk!
The benefits of these open-source methods are listed here.
#OCP #OpenCompute #DataStreaming #DataCenters #EnergyEfficiency #OCPSummit25
