Cloudflare has joined the ranks of operators that believe baseboard management controllers (BMCs) no longer belong on server motherboards.

The internet-taming company on Tuesday revealed its stance in a post by electrical hardware engineer Xiaomin Shen and senior hardware systems engineer JQ Lau, who together explain that BMCs perform vital functions such as power management, sensor monitoring, allowing remote firmware updates, event logging, and error reporting.

But the pair note that many components in a server is speeding up, but BMCs are not. Because they’re on the motherboard, BMCs are also as tightly coupled to servers as is possible.

Hardware wonks therefore devised Datacenter-ready Secure Control Modules (DC-SCMs) – discrete boards that do the job of the BMC. The Open Compute project delivered a version 1.0 DC-SCM spec [PDF] in 2021 and updated [PDF] to version 2.0 in May 2023.

As Shen and Lau explain, server motherboards built to handle DDR5 and PCIE Gen 5 require printed circuit boards to have 14 or more layers. The less demanding components needed for a BMC n