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I work for a server manufacturer. We integrate other people's hardware (SuperMicro and Intel EPSD mostly) and sell it to customers. We sell everything from simple individual systems to highly-integrated multi-rack clusters to an incredibly diverse set of customers.

We were one of the initial Open Compute hardware partners thanks to some historical networking connections. We had almost zero interest in Open Compute from our customers. Maybe a dozen quotes total over six months, and we've never shipped a single Open Compute system despite all the initial hype, and despite the designs suiting a lot of our repeat customers. Nobody that would otherwise buy a commodity server wants these Open Compute designs, at least from us. We ended our Open Compute effort a few months ago.

Is anyone outside of the original designers actually using Open Compute hardware in a production environment?




Open Compute is really desirable if you meet one criterion; you are designing a purpose built infra for a SOA app.

If you are building a singular app that requires a DC specifically built to meet your scaling requirements, then Open Compute can fit your needs.

If you rent a rack, cage, area in a DC - then you'll fail.

The Open Compute initiative i similar to Zuck's H1B Visa actions; they are solely designed to meet his specific needs. To put it bluntly; don't be fooled by this effort for FB to PR their personal optimizations...

Notice how GOOG never even promoted their internal server/system/DC design and kept all their design vendors under NDA lock and key?

FB tried to "open source" a proprietary architecture approach (they stole from google) in a PR push to look like they were doing the industry good...

The fact is that open compute CAN be great - so long as you're operating at the scale that you can really benefit; OR if a provider embraces the full scope of open compute deployents... this is ONLY recognized with players such as amazon and rackspace (lesser)....

It is NOT an capital sot savings; "It takes money to make money, but once you have money; money makes itself"

No way a small ISP is going to be able to operate this way.

The benefit for open compute infra going forward will be in the modular space.


Google never published any information about it's internal server designs because they suffer from NIH and many times come up with really crappy hardware.

Nobody stole anything from Google. FB's design's are different enough, otherwise Google would have sent David Drummond and his asshole lawyers team after FB. Didn't happen.

Google's platforms team always takes this arrogant approach bragging about their 5 year lead and then come up with broken and buggy products that have to be supported and suffered by various SRE teams.

Their servers are just run off the mill AMD or Intel based design's with a single 12v DC power requirement to make it easier to hook them up to Google's proprietary Ikea racks.

There are alternate design like Manifest Destiny which uses POWER cpus, but they're not in production yet.


@bent_rayner:

I was referring to the concept of building internally - not the actual device designs.

Chill.


Maybe Open Compute would gain more traction if you could buy these supposedly cost effective parts from the usual value-oriented channels like Newegg.

There are plenty of shops, big and small, who prefer to do their own integration from white box parts for good reason. Having to call for quotes from some margin-hungry middleman who probably doesn't even have the stuff in stock sort of defeats the purpose of the "Open" platform.


Whiteboxing an Open Compute deployment isn't realistic. They're designed to run in non-standard racks with built-in power.

http://www.opencompute.org/assets/open-rack/Open_Compute_Pro...

The target audience won't be deploying one or two machines, they'll be deploying multiple racks. Given that we regularly ship customers full racks of machines and entire preconfigured clusters, we kind of expected some of them to be interested in the alleged superiority of the platform...


At Rackspace we are a founding member of the Open Compute Foundation though we did not supply the original designs. There is a good Q&A with our lead engineer about how we're using it: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/qa-rackspace-open-compute-engi...

Hardware goes through longer "sprints" than software. The equivalent of "merge and compile" is "setup a new manufacturing line" so it isn't surprising to me that at less than 3 years old adoption isn't widespread.




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