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Open Compute Project Driving Open-Source Hardware Development
The Open Compute Project was launched by Facebook early last year to facilitate collaborative development of highly-efficient computing infrastructure. They wanted to make datacenters cheaper and less energy-intensive to operate. Since then, many industry heavyweights have joined up, and the effects of the project are becoming evident in how companies buy hardware.
"Instead of the traditional scenario in which the company’s buying decisions are determined by what the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) such as Dell, HP, and IBM are offering, open sourcing hardware give companies the ability to buy the exact hardware they want.
Businesses are increasingly more curious about open source, and many of them are already deploying open source tools and the cloud, [Dell's Joseph George said]. They are increasingly looking at open source software as viable alternatives to commercial options. This level of exploration is moving to the infrastructure layer. 'Driving standards is what open source is about,' George added. With specifications at hand, it is possible to manufacture server and storage components that deliver consistent results regardless of who’s in charge of production.
Off the shelf components are dirt cheap, slap on Linux
True, off-the-shelf components are comparatively cheaper
True, Linux, in principle, is free, as in Free Beer
But that does not mean the combination of off-the-shelf components and Linux is the best there is
Proprietary hardware / software combo may carry a very high price tag, but, when we are talking about enterprise level computing, or computing in the level of data-centers, there are times proprietary equipments make more sense than off-the-shelf components - in term of stability, performance, and/or energy efficiency
I am all for open-source, but my own experience in the computing scene - especially in large-scale deployment - tells me that the best option there is might not be the cheapest option
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Facebook and the Open Computer project are not the only people doing this, nor are they the first (although they do go deeper than others, even designing the motherboards themselves).
Two years or so before Open Compute was founded, BackBlaze opensourced their storage pods, which fit 45 hard disks in a custom 4U chassis (they gave away the 3D plans as well). Last year, they updated it to version 2.0, which lets them store 135 TB in 4U for a total purchase cost (in 2011) of $7,384.
Inspired by that (as in, they say they were), Netflix did the "Open Connect" appliance, which is supposed to be open, although I can't actually find the design suitable for case manufacture.
Looks like many open-source hardware projects have stalled.
Case in point:
http://www.openfirmware.info/OpenBIOS
The latest download available is dated 2009-03-01
As for opencores.org the projects are scattered here and there
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The problem with making an opensource camera is actually the imaging sensor, the rest of the hardware is fairly trivial compared to that. Finding a well documented high resolution image sensor is hard at the best of times. Finding an affordable one is even harder.
Datacentres currently are estimated at consuming between 1.1% and 1.5% of the total power generated across the world. That's bigger than almost every other industry out there, heck that's bigger than quite a few medium-sized countries. With this sort of size then even a small percentage gain in efficiency makes a huge difference to costs. A modern datacentre has a yearly power bill of $10million or more, and so if you can find a way of doing the same processing using 2% less power - well those numbers suddenly start looking very good indeed when you realise the scale.
Personally I'm more excited about the new ARM servers that have been recently announced. For commodity type workloads they have a real chance to be a game changer in the amount of electricity needed to perform a task, and when the new 64-bit cores arrive then I can see them suddenly fitting a lot of strategies.
Disclaimer - I run a team responsible for all physical installations in a blue-chip datacentre