Facebook's open-source data-center project gains ground

IDG News Service - 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.

The project also aims to develop standards around which companies get better control of hardware instead of being locked into particular vendors. One focus area is cloud computing, where servers are added as demand scales up for Web-based services.

"We've started to see a convergence of voices among the consumers of this technology around where we think the industry would benefit from standardization and where we think the opportunities for innovation are," said Frank Frankovsky, founding board member of the Open Compute Project, in a blog entry.

Frankovsky wrote that some new hardware designs included Facebook's "vanity-free" storage server and motherboard designs contributed by chip makers AMD and Intel. AMD's motherboard is about 16-inches by 16.5-inches (40.6 centimeters by 41.9 centimeters), and is for high-performance computing and general purpose installations such as cloud deployments. On the software side, VMware will certify its vSphere virtualization platform to run on hardware based on the OpenRack specification.

If the Facebook design becomes a de-facto industry standard for cloud and Web 2.0 data centers, it could make the deployment and management of systems easier over time, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"The Facebook standard seems to be a data-center centric effort where you are looking to establish a system-design standard that can populate a data center with hundreds of thousands of servers," King said.

OCP started as a collaboration project when Facebook engineers designed hardware for the company's Prineville, Oregon, data center. Facebook ultimately opened up the hardware designs, including motherboards, power supply, server chassis, server rack and battery cabinets. At the time, Facebook said the Prineville data center used 38 percent less energy than Facebook's other data centers, while costing 24 percent less.