I’ve gone to all the Open Compute Summits (five in all) and I know many of the people in the organization. It can be hard to describe what the open compute summit is given I have seen it grow.

Here is a Forbes article on the Open Compute Summit and Intel’s Software defined infrastructure. The part that jumped out was the description of the event.

I attended the Open Compute Summit last week in San Jose, where industry leaders in the scale-out datacenter industry gathered to discuss and attempt to get some kind of alignment on future architectures and building blocks. By architecture, I mean the building blocks, the interconnects and the rules by which future football field size datacenters will be designed and operate.

The Open Compute Summit continues to grow in attendance. Last one had 1,500, this one had 2,400. It is free to attendees and the presentations are much better than many other data center events.

The Open Compute Summit is not about the low level infrastructure of power and cooling. The event is more about the stuff you put in a data center for scale-out infrastructure.

We’ll see if the next event hits 3,000, but even if they hit only 2,500 again, the event will be significant.