Facebook's open source data center project gains industry support

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 research companies joining the effort and introducing server designs.

The project as well 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 innovation around where we think the industry would benefit from standardization and where we think the opportunities for research 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 chipmakers AMD and Intel. AMD's motherboard is about 16 inches by 16.5 inches, for high-performance computing and general purpose installations just as cloud deployments. On the software side, VMware will certify its vSphere virtualization platform to run on hardware based on the OpenRack specification.

Discover a new breed of data protection that meets the needs of small and midsize businesses because it is simple to deploy, safe and cost effective.