Open Compute

The Open Compute Project is working hard to generate and develop a leadership stance on environmental stewardship. Facebook, one of the founders of Open Compute, has made significant accomplishments by establishing industry leading Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metrics (the ratio of the power delivered to a facility that is available for servers to consume).

Rackspace is involved with the Open Compute Project on a number of different activities. One of my main purposes right now is to help shape the Open Compute environment to insure that designs are optimized for our customers. This includes developing rack designs; making sure that the Open Rack project provides the necessary resilience and flexibility; shaping the motherboard designs to ensure that the I/O attributes are in place to provide the connectivity resources that we need; and more.

The Facebook-founded Open Compute Project opens up the hardware specs for servers and datacenters – the physical components of the infrastructure stack. It’s an ambitious project that takes the concepts of open source software and applies it to the hardware space.

From Rogue IT to cloud lock-in, the 2012 Rackspace Cloud Adoption Survey has uncovered top cloud concerns of IT decision makers.

I sit in a hotel room in Taipei overlooking foreign streets replete with distinctive and unusual attributes. I have eaten my initiate morsel of stinky tofu, shot arrows five feet or six feet into balloons at a carnival venue and enjoyed much delicious fare – stinky tofu being a notable exception! I have also been blessed with the attentions of some of the most amicable and hospitable people I have encountered in my career. True, it is not singularly Open Compute which has asserted this set of circumstances, but this is perhaps one of the best opportunities for me to provide examples of the tenets of this project in action in a fundamental and tangible manner.

This week, the Open Compute Summit 2012 stormed The Castle, Rackspace’s San Antonio headquarters.

The third Open Compute Summit kicked off this morning at Rackspace’s San Antonio headquarters, aka The Castle.

It has been just over a year since Facebook shook up the server hardware and data center industry by releasing its custom high efficiency infrastructure designs to the world. Rather than simply showcase its accomplishments, the Facebook team chose to formulate a new open source project seeded with the results of its efforts. Thought leaders including Johnathan Heliger, Frank Frankovsky, Yael Maguire, Amir Michael, Gio Coglitore and others rallied efforts producing design specifications and forming a collaborative working community of consumers and contributors that would ultimately culminate in the creation of the Open Compute Foundation, an entity to manage the Open Compute Project (OCP).