OCF boss reflects on 20 years at 'bleeding edge' of HPC market

Russell Slack looks back on OCF’s history from selling Unix workstations to move into HPC market, MBO and navigating component shortages

With high performance computing reseller OCF turning 20 this year, CRN spoke to managing director Russell Slack to discuss the company's highs and lows in the HPC space over the last 20 years

How did OCF start out, and how did you first make a name for yourself in the HPC market?

20 years ago I was still very hands on, as my original background was part of the professional services team. HPC was very much in its embryonic stage; it was a research tool that only the most advanced Linux users had use for. The tooling was relatively immature and was mainly open source back then. The hardware itself wasn't very mature either; the interconnect between systems were just standard ethernet. So it was very much in its infancy and with that brought its own challenges with regards to stability, performance and fine tuning.

Prior to getting into HPC, we used to resell closed platform Unix workstations. So going into HPC and into clustering and this open-source environment was a new challenge for us which we found very exciting and interesting.

At the time, the Unix servers that were out there were extremely expensive and extremely powerful, but there was only so much money people could spend on these things. The notion of being able to string together hardware and take free software and make yourself a home grown cluster was very much of interest to a lot of academic groups out there. So for us it took off from there and we realised this was an area we could make some traction in. We started exploring that and a lot of the universities in the UK, with their grant money, were happy to buy more hardware and focus on slightly less mature operating systems.

And then it just snowballed. The software tooling out there got more complex and the community also supported that and it continued to thrive. It was a successful pivot.

What have been the most memorable breakthrough moments for OCF over the last 20 years?

There have been a good handful. The first Beowulf cluster we did was back in 2002, so in our first year. It was our first one of those that went out there. In 2004 we put out our first Spectrum Scale, it was originally called GPFS which is a parallel file system. So we implemented our first GPFS file system out on a customer site. At that time it wasn't being particularly used in the HPC arena at all, it was still the old fashioned NFS (network file system), and old-fashioned traditional shared storage.

In 2009 we got ourselves onto the top 500 list for supercomputers with one of the universities down south. That was a big one for us as well.

In 2010 we started to deliver petabyte sized storage systems. That was our first step into the petabyte area. In 2015 we started looking at some private cloud environments with OpenStack and HPC over the top. 2016 we did chip cooling systems, so we started to get into water cooling solutions. That same year we started to do containerised datacentres as well. Just around 2019 is when we brought to the market a managed service for HPC.

Have there been any low points over the last two decades?

Being at the forefront is something we're not shy of at all. But when you're at the bleeding edge of technology, there are always times when something's not worked as you'd expect - and that's part the parcel of it. At times projects have had to be extended as we work through whatever gremlins are in the system.

More recently, it's been delivery logistics that are causing the biggest issues. So getting kit from the other side of the planet into the UK and the problems associated with that. It's become more difficult to coordinate a delivery while having a safe working environment to build it, integrate it, turn it on and do all of that. In the last two or three years that has been a bit of a challenge for us and that has caused a bit of a headache.

How have component shortages impacted the HPC market?

It has been an issue. It has probably delayed us by a handful more weeks per project. HPC is a project driven business, so you can't just dropship items. There's always an element of waiting for various components to get to site and be built.

We've spoken to customers and had frank conversations that everyone in the IT industry is experiencing this and factoring in more contingency so expectations can still be met. It has not been a huge impact but it has just slowed down getting our hands on the tin, unfortunately

How did HPC fair during Covid, and what shape is OCF in after two years of navigating the pandemic?

If I'm honest, we were fortunate to some degree when the pandemic hit because it gave us a window of time to look back at ourselves and improve in terms of processes and headcount and looking at what we can do to bring more value to the customer. We put a lot of effort in during that first year of the pandemic looking internally and improving what we do.

We did a lot of internal training and we were very keen to ask our customers what we were doing right and wrong and just try and do a lot of self-improvement so we can come back to the market even stronger. We've added to our headcount over this period and we've got stronger plans to move forward successfully.

What's the most important lesson you've learned about building a successful business over the last 20 years?

One thing I learned coming from a technical background is to bring staff in around you that are better than you. Our recipe for success is based on our staff, and over the years we've brought in some really fantastic professionals into the team and they've really excelled at OCF.

One of the things I'm really proud of is how we put a lot of effort into training up and seeing them excel and knowing they're going to bring the next level of skillset above where I was in the early 2000s. With each generation of techies that come around, there's always a whole new skill set, so embracing that and bringing them into the team has been a real asset for us over the years. They really bring value to our customers with their skills and expertise.

So never think that you know it all.