Stephen Manley

Overview

Stephen Manley is Senior Principal Network Engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), serving as technical lead for RDMA fabrics operations — responsible for ensuring that OCI's AI cluster fabrics are healthy, stable, and revenue-generating. Manley witnessed first-hand the exponential growth of cluster scale at Oracle: from 3 MW when he joined three years ago, to 30 MW by end of year one, to multi-hundred MW, to current planning for 2–10 GW clusters. He documented the compounding optical reliability crisis: at 2025 scale (4.5 GW / 3M GPUs / 10M+ transceivers), the cluster-wide mean time to link flap is 48 seconds. He characterized the "bucket phenomenon" — data halls full of removed 800G optics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with no diagnostic attribution — as the operational signature of the problem. Manley is co-chair of the new OCP Optics Reliability Project alongside Credo's Chris Collins, aiming to standardize ZeroFlap approaches across the industry.