Facebook unveiled the Open Compute Project

Facebook unveiled its open Compute project in April 2011, a strong earthquake for the information industry. It is noteworthy that Facebook not only exposes technical documents, but even the design of CAD drawings for servers and data centers is completely open.

Facebook's move was also thought to have been likened to a paper published in 2004 by Google MapReduce. Google's openness in the years actually started the cloud-computing campaign that is now raging. Facebook today burned cloud computing to the hardware and data center.

Facebook will redesign a new standard rack in a large data center environment recently with new moves on the Facebook Open Compute Project.

The biggest change in the new standard racks is the width of the server itself, which has long been a data center standard for 19 inches. The new rack's standard extends it to 21 inches. The increase in rack width will create more space that will effectively improve heat dissipation while facilitating power and cable connections.

Frank Frankovsky, vice-president of Facebook's hardware design and supply chain, said that after consideration we eventually chose to give up the 19-inch-width standard.

Another initiative was announced recently at the Open Compute Summit in San Antonio, where Facebook will provide an innovative power management approach. The design feature is that the bus provides 12 volts of power to the server, which means that the server no longer requires a separate power supply. The new open Rack also provides a standard interface for both mechanical and hardware.

The new rack design for Open Compute project is currently supported by Dell and HP, and new standard racks will be loaded on the latest Dell and HP servers.

HP's Glenn Keel says HP is ready for the new standard rack, saving up to 50% more power than previous racks with 2 Xeon E5 processors. The new standard racks are clearly more promising in large-scale data center environments.

Dell's Forrest Norrod showcases Dell's Datacenter solutions, enabling customers to use different types of servers and storage devices in the new standard racks.

Just yesterday Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba announced their admission to the Open Computing program, launched by Facebook (Open Compute project).

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)