Key Players Endorse Facebook's Open Compute Project
The list of company's supporting Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP), an effort to provide open source datacenter design specifications, is growing.
The OCP last week announced the addition of new members Alibaba, AMD, Avnet, Canonical, Cloudscaling, DDN, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard, Salesforce.com, Quanta, Supermicro Tencent, Vantage and VMware. They join existing members Arista Networks, Dell, Intel, Goldman Sachs, Rackspace, Red Hat and Synnex.
More than 500 people attended the second OCP Summit, held last week at Rackspace's headquarters in San Antonio. The first summit was held in New York back in November. Since that meeting, the OCP has notched a number of key accomplishments, wrote Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook and an OCP board member.
"The momentum that has gathered behind the project -- especially in the last six months -- has been nothing short of amazing," he said. In addition to announcing the new members, Frankovsky said HP, Quanta and Tencent have joined the OCP Incubation Committee, which determines what projects it the overall group will support.
Already on the committee's docket is Facebook's design for a storage server, code-named Knox, and "highly efficient" motherboard designs targeted to meet requirements of financial services firms. The designs include a Roadrunner, the code name for AMD's design, and Decathlete, Intel's offering.
The OCP also said it will bring together its Open Rack server rack design with a similar spec called Project Scorpio, developed by Baidu and Tencent. The goal is to have a common server rack design spec in 2013. Dell and HP both have server and storage system designs that will be compatible with the new spec.
Software providers also announced support for the OCP rack configuration. Among them were VMware, which will certify its vSPhere virtualization software to run on OCP-compatible systems and DDN will certify its WOS storage system. In addition, Linux distributor Canonical said it will provide certification.
The consortium also launched the OCP Solutions Provider program, which will let partners and distributors sell Open Compute Project-compatible systems. Among those that said they are seeking to join the program are Avnet, Hyve and ZT Systems as well as Quanta's QCT and Wistron's Winynn.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/07/2012 at 1:14 PM