Making It Real: Next Steps for the Open Compute Project

When we announcedthe initiation of the Open Compute Project earlier this year, we posed an audacious question to the industry: What if hardware were open?The benefits, if we could make it work, were clear enough: More openness and collaboration would likely mean a faster pace of innovation in infras (...)

The OCP Wants You

For those of you who attended the second Open Compute Project Summit can attest, the project has a lot of momentum, and the community has really taken shape. As this is a community effort, we would love to hear what you're doing with the Open Compute Project. How do you plan on implementing OCP tech (...)

Learning Lessons at the Prineville Data Center

Facebook's data center in Prineville, OR, has been one of the most energy efficient data center facilities in the world since it became operational early this year. Some of the innovative features of the electrical distribution system are DC backup and high voltage (480 VAC) distributions, which hav (...)

After the OCP Summit, Another Chapter Begins

The second Open Compute Project Summit was a resounding success, but that just means we as a community have a lot of work ahead of us to advance the goals and benefits of open hardware. Through a series of presentations by industry luminaries and technical workshops, hundreds of participants came to (...)

Open Rack Spec Available

This morning we announced the Open Rack specification. The open rackuses an all-encompassing design to accommodate compatible Open Compute Project chassis components, and includes the power solution as well as input and output voltage distribution. You can download the spec now fromGitHub. If you're (...)

Welcome!

Welcome to the new opencompute.org! This revamp focuses the site onprojects and the community. Please bear with us as we work out our kinks,but we have a new streamlined project browser with links to some projectson GitHub! Our original specifications were created in Word and convertedto PDFs, not a (...)

More Effective Computing

Facebook's Prineville, Oregon, data center, which opened in April 2011, had a Power Usage Effectiveness PUE of 1.08 for the second quarter of 2011, compared to 1.07 in the first quarter1. For the first half of the year, this means 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every Open Compute serv (...)

Saving Data Center Power by Reducing HDD Spin Speed

Many data centers sit on a lot of "cold storage" -- servers containing terabytes of user data that must be retained but is rarely accessed, because users no longer need that data. While the servers are considered cold because they are rarely utilized, their hard drives are usually spinning at full s (...)

OCP + ODCA = Open Collaboration

Operating at Web scale, and doing so as efficiently as possible, is the next great challenge facing the IT industry. The Open Compute Project was formed to help us all meet that challenge; it's our hope that adopting an "open source" approach to building servers, storage, power supplies, and data ce (...)

Characteristics of Low Carbon Data Centers

A team of researchers including Eric Masanet at Northwestern University, Arman Shehabi at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jonathan Koomey at Stanford University wrote an article in the current issue of the refereed journal Nature Climate Change, summarizing the key factors affecting the g (...)