Web servers stand inside the Facebook Prineville Data Center in Prineville, Oregon. Bloomberg via Getty Images
While open hardware has become much more than a buzzword over the last couple of years, it has undeniably garnered more media attention than it otherwise would have because of Facebook. The company has operated as more than a social network for a couple of years now, launching global internet connectivity and open source projects. But its Open Compute initiative — unveiled in 2011 — has slowly been creeping into the spotlight ever since Facebook revealed that it was stepping into the world of hardware. This week, the company unveiled its first system-on-a-chip (SoC) compute server as another element of its Open Compute efforts.
Facebook’s SoC server solution is based on Intel’s new 14-nanometer Xeon D processors and is dubbed Yosemite. The platform aims to support up to four independent servers. This is yet another product issue from the company after its February launch of its modular, open-source data center network switch. Aside from the nitty gritty details, what is important is that these hardware structures are part of Open Compute’s broader mission to “design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing” according to the project’s website. Minimizing environmental impact and making the technology designs available to anyone for improvement are two of the core goals of Open Compute, and hardware giants are taking note.
The network equipment industry is dominated by companies like Cisco, Dell, HP, and others. Facebook’s initiatives have not gone unnoticed; indeed, some of those big names have been working with this project to be a part of the growing open hardware sector. And companies like HP have been working on their own open hardware projects. HP has deployed servers called Cloudline; Microsoft has released new server designs as well as some open source code after it joined Open Compute last year; Dell and Juniper Networks have also jumped on the open network switch train.
The concept of open-source hardware or open hardware is similar to open-source software in that it means the technology is part of an ecosystem which allows anyone to alter and/or improve the technology. Open hardware is an overhauling of a server’s traditional components to make them more interchangeable, and to allow for speedier, more efficient processing. With Facebook’s Open Compute project leading the pack, a new era of computing is certainly upon us.
