Facebook’s Open-Source Data Center Project Gains Strength CIO.com

Facebook’s year-old project to develop open-source hardware designs with the aim to build efficient data centers gained momentum on Wednesday, with some top technology companies joining the effort and introducing server designs.

The company provided details about implementations of the open hardware designs and also announced new members of the Open Compute Project, including Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, Canonical and Supermicro. HP and Dell have contributed new server and storage designs that fit into OCP’s Open Rack specification, which covers hardware, such as motherboards and power components, that goes inside a server chassis.

The Open Compute Project was announced by Facebook in April last year and revolves around opening up hardware specifications and designs to create power-efficient and economical data centers. The project shares the ethos of the open-source software movement, with a community working together to share, tweak and update hardware designs with the aim of improving products.

Facebook’s Open-Source Data-Center Project Gains Strength CIO.com.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.