This morning we announced the Open Rack specification. The open rack uses 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 from GitHub. If you’re interested in keeping up to date on the open rack, join…

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 together and discussed the Open…

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 have eliminated the need for centralized UPS and…

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 technologies…

When we announced the 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 infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best…

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 centers will ultimately lead to…

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 speed although they are…

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 server. This…

Welcome to the new opencompute.org! This revamp focuses the site on projects 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 projects on GitHub! Our original specifications were created in Word and converted to PDFs, not a code-friendly manner to do open hardware…