Synchronization in the Datacenter

Presented by Heiko Gerstung (Meinberg)

Datacenters are everywhere and come in different shapes and colours. They are used in a large variety of industries and applications, not only by hyperscalers, telecommunication giants or financial organizations but also by media and broadcast companies, defense organizations, power grid management institutions and many, many more. All of them need time and/or frequency synchronization in one form or another to either optimize resources like bandwidth or storage, improve cybersecurity (and physical security), measure operational parameters like latency – and sometimes simply add timestamps to event logs.

This talk is going to describe a few of these synchronization applications in datacenters and uses real-world examples to illustrate the importance of time and frequency synchronization for various applications. It is going to highlight where the use cases for the OCP-TAP project are and tries to outline the importance of ensuring that time synchronization has to be considered in project plans right from the beginning and therefore is a requirement for all future specifications, in order to save money, time (no pun intended) and other resources required to retrofit an existing datacenter infrastructure or a project plan.