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Data Centers

Facebook-Led Open Compute Project Plans The Future Of The Data Center

There’s a new open source project--led by giant companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Dell--that is looking to change data center hardware in the same way that traditional open source projects have impacted software.
Jim Rapoza
November 08, 2011

  • The Open Compute Project, which recently held a summit in New York to announce several new projects, is dedicated to finding a way to do for large data center hardware what projects like Linux and Apache have done for enterprise software. The Open Compute Project has released specifications for data center hardware, including servers, racks, batteries, and cooling and electrical design. With these open specifications, the idea is that companies and vendors will be able to build products designed to these open hardware specifications. The focus of the Open Compute Project is on the highest-end data centers, the kinds that one would find in companies such as Facebook and Amazon. But there is potential for some of these designs to find their way eventually into smaller data centers. And there is a great deal of potential for savings in power, better and cheaper cooling, and much greater interoperability for hardware in a data center.

  • One of the designs from the Open Compute Project can be seen in these massive triplet racks. These racks have three 42U columns, and each rack can hold 90 servers.


  • Also as part of the data center design, interspersed among the racks, will be these stand-alone battery cabinets. The battery cabinet provides backup power at 48-volt DC nominal to a pair of triplet racks.

  • These very simple chassis designs will serve as the body of the servers within Open Computer data centers. The chassis is designed to be swappable and easily serviced.

  • This AMD motherboard is built to Open Compute server specs. It is a dual AMD Opteron 6100 Series socket motherboard with 24 DIMM slots.

  • There is also an Intel mother board built to Open Compute server specs. It is a dual Xeon 5500 or Xeon 5600 socket motherboard with 18 DIMM slots.

  • The power supply designed for Open Compute Project servers is a 450W power supply. The power converter includes independent AC input and DC output connectors, plus a DC input connector for backup voltage.

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Data Centers
Data Centers