Facebook opens out Open Compute Project

BANGALORE, INDIA: Facebook announced the formation of a foundation for the Open Compute Project, which was initialised earlier this year.

The mission of this project is to "enable the development of the most efficient servers, storage and data center infrastructure from a useful work per total cost perspective, in order to bring computing to people at the lowest cost and widest distribution" says the Open Compute Project website.

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"Our first step for the Open Compute Project is releasing the specifications and mechanical drawings. The second step is working with the community to improve them," said Frank Frankovsky, Director, Technical Operations at Facebook in a note on the site.

It also published the specs and design of the proposed project.

Open Source Software and Hardware will serve to democratize access to the best server, storage and data center technologies available. The focus of this project is on open technologies that can be multi-sourced, adds the website.

The last six months were spent working with many of data centre players to build structure around the Open Compute Project, solicit tangible contributions to push the Project’s work forward and find ways to start making Open Compute hardware available to anyone who wants to consume it, adds Frankovsky.

An initial slate of directors and advisers, including Andy Bechtolsheim from Arista Networks, Don Duet from Goldman Sachs, Frank Frankovsky from Facebook, Mark Roenigk from Rackspace and Jason Waxman from Intel, were also announced.

Moreover, it also released a summary of its mission and guiding principles, and details on how projects will be proposed, evaluated and supported under the OCP banner.

It also release a full list of the Project’s first set of official members soon, which include hardware suppliers like Intel, Asus, Dell, and Huawei; software suppliers like Red Hat and Cloudera; enablers like Nebula, and Baidu; consumers like Facebook, Mozilla, Rackspace, Netflix, and Goldman Sachs.