Facebook made serious progress this week in its plan to revolutionize the $55 billion server industry.
It announced some amazing new features for its Open Compute Project, which changes the way computer servers are designed and built. The new features are so big, that GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham described them as "the killing blow" to the server market.
As we reported last August, Open Compute could disrupt some of the largest enterprise tech companies in the world like IBM, HP, and Dell. It does for commercial hardware what open source did for commercial software—lets the users design what they want.
OCP has created a new type of server that costs less to build and operate. It uses fewer materials and causes less waste for the landfill when decommissioned, too.
This week, the project introduced new features that turn a computer server into a Lego-like assembly project where IT people can pick and choose all the components, right down to the CPU, and snap them together.
Using a new feature called the “Group Hug” slot, an IT user can assemble their own motherboards.
That's different from how it's done today, says the man leading Facebook's OCP project, Frank Frankovsky, in a blog post. CPUs are "inextricably linked to our motherboards, which are in turn linked to specific networking technology, and so on."
By breaking all of that apart Lego-style, IT people get custom servers that cost less, perform faster and are greener to operate than traditional servers.
Chip makers Intel, AMD and Applied Micro have signed on to support the Group Hug board. So has server maker Calxeda, who is itself trying to disrupt the server industry with servers based on ARM chips, the same CPU that runs your smartphone and tablet.
Intel has taken its support of the OCP even further. It is contributing a way to build a super-fast alternative to a traditional motherboard altogether, based on its new "silicon photonics technology." Silicon photonics uses light (photons) instead of copper wires to transfer data at very fast speeds, up to 100 Gbps. That's so fast, chips don't even have to be on a motherboard at all, components can be spread out across a rack.
Here's what this newfangled OCP server looks like.
Compare that to this high end PureSystems server from IBM.
Excitement for Open Compute is growing among tech vendors and IT users. The project just added more than a dozen new members including storage-oriented companies like EMC, Fusion-io, Hitachi, Applied Micro, ARM and Sandisk. All told, some 50 organizations are part of the project, Frankovsky says.
All designs that they contribute to the project become open source, meaning that anyone can take them, use them, modify them to build their own servers.
OCP doesn't necessarily spell doom for server makers like HP and Dell, although it does take design control out of their hands. But it could be a brand new market for them, too. Both HP and Dell are getting in front of this and are participating with the project.
Don't miss: Inside Facebook's Plan To Revolutionize The Entire Hardware Industry
and Facebook's Revolutionary Data Center Was Designed On A Napkin
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