

Marco Arment on the Open Compute Project - cobrien
http://www.marco.org/4458987911

======
chuhnk
I agree with the closing statements that facebook is making a point here, it
strongly says "we are here for the long haul". I think openness like this also
advances datacenter technology and efficiency as a whole, its one aspect
that's overlooked by most of us but plays a crucial role in scaling. If you
can reduce power consumption, improve cooling and squeeze more servers in
racks then we are looking at a lot more hardware to play with. I cant see
small startups benefiting from this but large scale companies definitely,
twitter comes to mind. Their communication platform will only continue to
require more processing power and capitalizing on open compute would be a key
growth advantage for them.

------
trotsky
When I read about the OCP the conclusion I drew was that facebook liked their
designs but felt they were paying too much of a premium over true commodity
components. If you release the designs and get people interested it would seem
to lead to greater demand from data center customers and greater supply from
OEM's that would move to fill the demand. The resulting marketplace would be
substantially higher volume and served by multiple competing manufacturers.
That should drive facebook's own acquisition costs down, increase the volume
they can order in a short time without paying expensive tooling fees, and
allow them to play one vendor off another to obtain better terms.

I didn't really pay attention to the previous discussion, so I don't know if
for some reason that theory's been debunked. It sounds a lot more plausible to
me than it being a ploy to recruit software engineers, though.

------
aufreak3
While we're guessing why fb did this, it certainly looks like something that
govt bodies which might need to run such infrastructure can borrow. If fb is,
for example, shooting for the "national id" programme as I read somewhere,
who'd you expect a govt to pick? - a company whose infrastructure cannot be
touched or certified for suitability and security or one whose arch is laid
bare like so? Of course, the software is part of the architecture, but would
the "open graph" suffice?

(ok, 'nuff wild speculation for the day!)

------
oprah2
Where is the Bios code?

~~~
wmf
Getting coreboot running on the Facebook motherboards would be a nice next
step. It's probably not feasible for the Intel boards due to NDAs, but AMD is
probably game.

