At the second Open Compute Project Summit in New York City today, Facebook announced the formation of a foundation to lead the Open Compute Project (OCP). It includes an initial slate of directors and advisers: Andy Bechtolsheim as an individual contributor, Don Duet from Goldman Sachs, Frank Frankovsky from Facebook, Mark Roenigk from Rackspace, and Jason Waxman from Intel.
Facebook is also planning to release a summary of OCP’s mission and guiding principles later today and further details regarding how OCP projects will be proposed, evaluated, and supported (PDF). A full list of official members is also coming, though a partial list is now available:
- Hardware suppliers like Intel, ASUS, Dell, Mellanox, and Huawei.
- Software suppliers like Red Hat, Cloudera and Future Facilities.
- Enablers like DRT, Hyve (Synnex), Nebula, Baidu, and Silicon Mechanics.
- Consumers like Facebook, Mozilla, Rackspace, NTT Data, Tivit, the ODCA, and Goldman Sachs.
- Organizations like Georgia Tech University, North Carolina State University, and CERN.
Facebook announced the initiation of the Open Compute Project just six months ago. The company outlined the benefits of releasing open hardware, inspired by the model of open source software. Palo Alto also declared it wanted to share the innovations in its data center for the entire industry to use and improve upon. The social networking giant hoped and still hopes the collaboration will result in a faster pace of innovation in infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best possible technology for everyone, more efficiency in scale computing, and a reduced environmental impact through the sharing of best practices.
“The community has since responded to the challenge of making hardware more open with an enthusiasm and a level of commitment that has exceeded our expectations,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “A great deal of work remains to be done. We need to continue to grow the community and enable it to take on new challenges. We need to ensure that, as the community evolves, it retains its flat structure and its merit-based approach to evaluating potential projects. And we need to keep the community focused on delivering tangible results. But what began a few short months ago as an audacious idea — what if hardware were open? — is now a fully formed industry initiative, with a clear vision, a strong base to build from and significant momentum. We are officially on our way.”
