The Open Compute Project initiative was announced in April 2011 by Facebook to openly share designs of data center products.[1][2][3]
Components include:
- Open Vault storage building blocks offering high disk densities, with 30 drives in a 2U Open Rack chassis designed for easy drive replacement
- A single voltage (12.5 VDC) power supply designed to work with 277 VAC input and 48 VDC battery backup
- Mechanical mounting system: Open racks have the same outside width (600 mm) and depth as standard 19-inch racks, but are designed to mount wider chassis with a 537mm width (about 21 inches). This allows more equipment to fit in the same volume and improves air flow. Compute chassis sizes are defined in multiples of an OpenU, which is 48mm.
- Data center designs for energy efficiency, including 277 VAC power distribution that eliminates one transformer stage in typical data centers
- On May 8, 2013, an effort to define an open network switch was announced.[4] The plan was to allow Facebook to load its own operating system software onto the switch. Press reports predicted that more expensive and higher-performance switches would continue to be popular, while less expensive products treated more like a commodity (using the buzzword "top-of-rack") might adopt the proposal.[5]
References
- ^ Cade Metz (16 January 2013). "Facebook Shatters the Computer Server Into Tiny Pieces". Wired. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
- ^ Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project, by Jonathan Heiliger, April 7, 2011, Facebook Engineering's notes
- ^ "Will Open Compute Alter the Data Center Market".
- ^ Jay Hauser for Frank Frankovsky (8 May 2013). "Up next for the Open Compute Project: The Network". Open Compute blog. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
- ^ David Chernicoff (9 May 2013). "Can Open Compute change network switching?". ZDNet.
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External links
- Open Compute Project website
- Facebook's Open Compute Project - technical talk by Facebook engineer Amir Michael at Stanford University (video archive)