Facebook and the Open Compute Project (OCP) announced Wednesday that they’ve made huge strides toward the goal of setting standards for the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware available for scalable computing.

Facebook launched OCP 18 months ago hoping to crowdsource the problem of creating better hardware for high-scale computing. From its start with one member, Facebook, and 200 participants, the group now has more than 50 member companies and saw more than 2,000 participants attend this week’s Open Compute Platform Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.

OCP says its standards promise to deliver hardware that is 24% more energy efficient and 38% more cost efficient, on average, than so-called commodity hardware. The group is working on specs for storage, motherboard and server design, racks, interoperability, hardware management, and data center design.
Network Computing