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Facebook drives open rack standard

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 07 May 2012

Facebook drives open rack standard

Social network giant Facebook has made its stripped-down storage and rack designs available to businesses via the Open Compute Project, a move that could have an impact on the data centre industry, ZDNet reports.

Frank Frankovsky, the project's chairman and Facebook's director of technical operations, says the social network has worked with Chinese search engine Baidu and Web portal Tencent on creating a new standard for data centre rack designs, dubbed Open Rack, to make racks cheaper and easier to modify.

By 2013, Facebook is planning to merge the standard with Project Scorpio, a similar spec being developed by Baidu and Tencent, while HP and Dell have pledged to create server and storage boxes to fit with the new rack design, TechWeek Europe states.

Facebook first revealed Open Compute in April 2011, releasing low-energy data centre and server specifications used in its Oregon data centre. Dell and HP claim they planned to adopt and develop the standards.

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