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Facebook's year-old project to develop open source hardware designswith the aim to build efficient data centers gained momentum on Wednesday, with some top technology companiesjoining the effort and introducing server designs. The company provided details about implementations of the openhardware designs and also announced new members of the Open ComputeProject, including Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices,Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, Canonical, andSupermicro. HP and Dell have contributed new server and storagedesigns that fit into OCP's Open Rack specification, which covershardware, such as motherboards and power components, that goesinside a server chassis. [ Uncover the secrets of Facebook's high-efficiency data centers in InfoWorld's slideshow. Paul Venezia shares all his hard-earned data center know-how in the Deep End blog. Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog and Technology: Open Source newsletter . ] The Open Compute Project was announced by Facebook in April lastyear and revolves around opening up hardware specifications anddesigns to create power-efficient and economical data centers. Theproject shares the ethos of the open source software movement, witha community working together to share, tweak, and update hardwaredesigns with the aim of improving products. The project also aims to develop standards around which companiesget better control of hardware instead of being locked intoparticular vendors. One focus area is cloud computing, whereservers are added as demand scales up for Web-based services. "We've started to see a convergence of voices among the consumersof this technology around where we think the industry would benefitfrom standardization and where we think the opportunities forinnovation are," said Frank Frankovsky, founding board member ofthe 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 bychipmakers AMD and Intel. AMD's motherboard is about 16 inches by16.5 inches (40.6 centimeters by 41.9 centimeters), forhigh-performance computing and general purpose installations suchas cloud deployments. On the software side, VMware will certify itsvSphere virtualization platform to run on hardware based on theOpenRack specification. If the Facebook design becomes a de facto industry standard forcloud and Web 2.0 data centers, it could make the deployment andmanagement of systems easier over time, said Charles King,principal analyst at Pund-IT. "The Facebook standard seems to be a data-center-centric effortwhere you are looking to establish a system-design standard thatcan populate a data center with hundreds of thousands of servers,"King said. OCP started as a collaboration project when Facebook engineersdesigned hardware for the company's Prineville, Ore., data center.Facebook ultimately opened up the hardware designs, includingmotherboards, power supply, server chassis, server rack, andbattery cabinets. At the time, Facebook said the Prineville datacenter used 38 percent less energy than Facebook's other datacenters, while costing 24 percent less. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Serial Port Hub Manufacturer , China PCI-E Serial Card for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Serial Device Servers.
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