Facebook's plan to develop open source hardware design gained momentum in Wednesday

Facebook's plan to implement a one-year development of open source hardware design has gained momentum in Wednesday. Some technology companies have joined the effort and introduced some server designs. The goal of the project is to build efficient data centres.

Facebook provided details on the implementation of the Open-source hardware design and announced new members to join the Open Computing Program (OCP), including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, canonical and Supermicro. HP and Dell have contributed to the new server and storage design for open rack technical specifications for the opening computing program. This technical specification includes hardware such as motherboards and power supplies inside the server chassis.

The Open Computing program, announced by Facebook last April and developed around open hardware specifications, aims to create energy-efficient and economic data centers. This project shares the spirit of the open source software movement, sharing, modifying, and updating hardware designs in a community collaborative way, with the goal of improving the product.

There are some standards to be developed for this project. Companies are better able to control hardware around these standards than to be locked by specific vendors. One area of focus is cloud computing. The server will increase in cloud computing as demand increases to meet web-based service requirements.

' We are beginning to see a consistent view among consumers of this technology, ' said OCP founder Frank Frankovsky on the blog. We believe that the industry will benefit from standardization. We think there are opportunities for innovation.

Some of the new hardware designs include Facebook's "Vanity-free" (no waste) storage servers and AMD and Intel-contributed motherboard designs, Frankovsky wrote on the blog. AMD's motherboard size is 40.6 cm x 41.9 cm, suitable for common installations such as high-performance computing and cloud deployment. On the software side, VMware will certify its vsphere virtualization platform to run on hardware based on Openrack technical specifications.

If Facebook's design becomes a de facto industry standard for the cloud and Web 2.0 data centers, this will make it easier to deploy and manage the system over time, according to Charles King, a leading analyst at Pund.

King says Facebook's standards appear to be an effort focused on data centers. You are looking forward to establishing a system design standard in this effort. This standard can deploy thousands of servers in the data center.

OCP started as a collaborative project. At the time, Facebook engineers designed hardware for the company's data center in Oregon State Prineville. Facebook eventually opened up the hardware design, including motherboards, power supplies, server chassis, server racks, and battery cabinets. At the time, Facebook said the Prineville data center had a 38% reduction in energy use compared to other Facebook data centers and a 24% reduction in costs.

' Many companies like Google and Amazon have their own custom servers instead of buying off-the-shelf servers, ' says King. Customized servers reduce the financial burden and the burden of IT staff to deploy and maintain thousands of of servers.

King says the OCP standards Organization should also benefit companies that have joined. By introducing a new server design based on open rack, HP and Dell now have the opportunity to design and meet the server specification requirements of big customers such as Google. Otherwise, these companies will be from the quanta computer, such as third-party manufacturers to obtain the server.

AMD's new motherboard design is for financial services companies, said Vlad Rozanovich, vice president of AMD's Business in the Americas. Financial services companies typically deploy servers for transaction processing or internal cloud. AMD's motherboard design is easily customized.

Rozanovich says each motherboard cannot accommodate all requirements in one size, especially in the financial services industry. One thing we need to do is to cancel what we don't need.

Wall Street companies generally need internal server management, Rozanovich said. One of AMD's modifications includes canceling the management components on the motherboard. Some motherboards include components of a remote Management server. Simplified motherboards enable financial services companies to better control and manage servers.

The basic hardware used by the financial services community is already very simple. The open source motherboard specification will make it easier and cheaper to manage and deploy the server. (Compiled/Populus euphratica)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)