
Microsoft Joins the Open Compute Project, Shares its Server Designs  - 1SockChuck
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/01/27/microsoft-joins-open-compute-project-shares-server-designs/
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McGlockenshire
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?

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
bent_rayner
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.

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rafaelferreira
Straight out of Joel Sposky's "Smart companies try to commoditize their
products' complements" strategy:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html)

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gtirloni
I think this is FB, Microsoft et al creating a pool of vendors that can supply
them with hardware that follows the design they need.

The fact that other company can use the designs is just a side effect,
unlikely to impact their operations (as is, enabling competitors).

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gulfie
Bankrolled purchasers are attempting to commodity the server landscape into a
platform that choke smaller companies.

Something about embrace, extend and extinguish...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

SSDD

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jokoon
I wish that the success of Apple would put pressure on Microsoft to slowly
open their platform and work with open source.

~~~
blahbl4hblahtoo
They are also open sourcing the chassis management system that they use for
these systems.

They open sourced the hyper-v drivers for linux and freebsd and got them
integrated into the kernel.

Asp.Net is completely open source and hosted on GitHub.

Here's a list of open source projects that they have started or contributed to
on platforms/languages like Java, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby...

[http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/directory.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/directory.aspx)

They open source quite a bit of software...

~~~
thinkpad20
I believe the F# and TypeScript languages are both open source as well.

That said, most of their flagship stuff is closed, in many cases
understandably so but in others, it doesn't make as much sense (to me), and
seems not to benefit anyone.

~~~
blahbl4hblahtoo
You are correct sir.

I'm with you...I think that they should have open sourced a lot of the
supporting software around windows server. I wouldn't really care if the
source was available, it would be nice, but I personally think that System
Center should be free to any customer with more than 100 servers.

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alrs
This counts as a wanton act of hostility toward every server vendor in the x86
space.

Is this payback for all of the PC players adopting Chromebook and Android, or
is this the tipping point where MS has decided not to care about selling
Windows Server and instead cares only about driving down its own costs to
deploy Azure and O365?

~~~
nivla
Sorry but what? If you read the article, its about open sourcing their rack
and server designs. You know like Facebook did when they built their own
datacenter? (and no they din't do it from the threat of Google+'s popularity.)

I think these documentations will be very helpful for startups and companies
moving away from the cloud to building their own datacenters.

I remember Blackblaze open sourcing something similar, their pod designs,
which were not only immensely helpful for other startups and companies but
also for individuals building home server racks.

~~~
alrs
Yes. Giving away designs for x86 racks and servers hurts Dell, HP, and IBM.

