HiWire Consortium has announced that its standardisation efforts will be absorbed into a new Interconnects Sub-Project inside the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) in the hope to increase cable standardisation and improve network sustainability.
“The HiWire Consortium leads the inaugural effort to bring standardisation to a new category of connectivity products – Active Electrical Cables (AECs),” said Sheng Huang, President of the HiWire Consortium. “As AECs move into the mainstream, we feel the broader umbrella of OCP will continue to accelerate standardisation efforts and increase industry adoption.”
“Within the next five years, the 650 Group predicts AECs will take over 75 per cent of server connections and displace chassis in hyperscale data centers,” said Don Barnetson, Vice President for AEC Products at Credo and the OCP AEC project lead. “Standardisation within OCP will further accelerate adoption among the hyperscalers and telecom service provider space.”
As a result of this announcement, OCP will have oversight for the ratified HiWire Specification v1.0, which was originally announced in 2020. The new AEC Project inside OCP will build on this specification by adding additional speeds, capabilities, and test specifications as driven by OCP membership.
“OCP’s members see AECs as a critical technology for their customers which include the world’s largest hyperscalers,” said Steve Helvie, Vice President of Channel Development for OCP. “The Community is excited to continue this cable standardisation work and thanks to the HiWire Consortium for its pioneering effort to bring this revolutionary product to market with such broad industry acceptance. We are also very fortunate to have Credo as a certified OCP Solution Provider showcasing AECs on our OCP Marketplace, providing the Community with a more comprehensive set of OCP solutions.”
“Active Electrical Cables are key to enabling cloud infrastructure interconnectivity at the density, scale and ultra-low power required to meet our demands for the coming years,” said Gerald Degrace, Senior Director of Next Gen Technology, Microsoft. “As an active member of both the HiWire Consortium and OCP we are excited by the synergies of standardising AECs inside OCP’s broad industry scope.”
“Deploying a Distributed, Disaggregated Chassis (DDCs) paired with AECs is a simple ‘fire and forget’ practice that improves network sustainability,” said Eli Moskovitch, Vice President of Operations at DriveNets. “The DDC ecosystem support for AEC enables frictionless buildouts of the world’s largest routers as required by our top-tier customer base.”
