'Cultlike' Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit (businessinsider.com)

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider's Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: "'OCP has a cultlike following,' one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. 'The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.' OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it 'open source' so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there's a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple's networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely -- never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple's exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple's secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said 'no.' 'The whole team quit the same week,' this person told us."

Comments

You can't protect against everything.

[techno-vampire]

It's nice to talk about 100% uptime, but you can't protect your network from everything. As an example, what do you do if/when there's another Carrington Event and much of the power grid goes out? Yes, some of the backbone will still be working and you have backup power, but how much and how long will it last? Even if your data centers are hardened enough to keep the flare from frying your servers and routers, all you can do is hope that the electric grid comes back before your generators run out of fuel because if they do, you're going down no matter how good your plan is. And, as you can only stockpile a finite quantity of fuel, you can't guarantee staying up until the power's back. Yes, that's not the only disaster that could bring Apple and Google down, but most of the others are man made, and I wanted to show that even a natural disaster (or Act of God if you prefer) can overwhelm the best laid plans of mice or men.