Google joins Open Compute Project, contributes 48V rack

Google has joined the Open Compute Project and plans to contribute a new rack specification to run the infrastructure in its data centers.

With the addition of Google, most of the hyperscale cloud players are in the OCP, which was started in 2011 by Facebook. Microsoft has been using OCP specs in its Azure cloud.

Google said that it will contribute a 48V power distribution rack so it can use OCP technology in its data center.

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The news comes as OCP kicks off its U.S. summit in San Jose.

In a blog post, Google said it has been tweaking power supplies for years going from 12-volt architectures in 2006 to more efficient versions in 2009. In 2010, Google started developing a 48V rack power distribution and boosted efficiency by 30 percent.

The company added that it is collaborating with Facebook on a common 48V rack that will be submitted to OCP. Google added:

As the industry's working to solve these same problems and dealing with higher-power workloads, such as GPUs for machine learning, it makes sense to standardize this new design by working with OCP. We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google.