The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an organization that shares designs of data center products and best practices among companies, including

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

, Meta, IBM, Wiwynn,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

, Seagate Technology, Dell,

Rackspace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the ...

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, Goldman Sachs,

Fidelity Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of ''fealty''. Both derive from the Latin word ''fidēlis'', meaning "faithful or loyal". In the City of London fin ...

, Lenovo and Alibaba Group.

Project structure

The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit incorporated in the state of Delaware. Rocky Bullock serves as the Foundation's CEO and has a seat on the board of directors. As of July 2020, there are 7 members who serve on the board of directors which is made up of one individual member and six organizational members. Mark Roenigk (

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

) is the Foundation's president and chairman. Andy Bechtolsheim is the individual member. In addition to Mark Roenigk who represents

, other organizations on the Open Compute board of directors include

(Rebecca Weekly),

(Kushagra Vaid),

(Partha Ranganathan), and

(Jim Hawkins). A current list of members can be found on th
opencompute.org
website.

History

The Open Compute Project began in Facebook as an internal project in 2009 called "Project Freedom". The hardware designs and engineering team were led by Amir Michael (Manager, Hardware Design) and sponsored by Jonathan Heiliger (VP, Technical Operations) and Frank Frankovsky (Director, Hardware Design and Infrastructure). The three would later open source the designs of Project Freedom and co-found the Open Compute Project. The project was announced at a press event at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto on April 7th 2011.

OCP projects

The Open Compute Project Foundation maintains a number of OCP projects, such as:

Server designs

Two years after Open Compute Project had started, with regards to a more modular server design, it was admitted that "the new design is still a long way from live data centers". However, some aspects published were used in Facebook's Prineville data center to improve energy efficiency, as measured by the

power usage effectiveness Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a ratio that describes how efficiently a computer data center uses energy; specifically, how much energy is used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead that supports the equipment). ...

index defined by

The Green Grid The Green Grid is a nonprofit, industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers. At one time it had more than 175 ...

.
video archive
Efforts to advance server compute node designs included one for

processors and one for

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

processors. In 2013,

Calxeda Calxeda (previously known as Smooth-Stone) was a company that aimed to provide computers based on the ARM architecture for server computers. It operated from 2008 through 2013. In March 2011 Calxeda announced a 480-core server in development, c ...

contributed a design with ARM architecture processors. Since then, several generations of OCP server designs have been deployed: Wildcat (Intel), Spitfire (AMD), Windmill (Intel E5-2600), Watermark (AMD), Winterfell (Intel E5-2600 v2) and Leopard (Intel E5-2600 v3)

Data storage

Open Vault storage building blocks offer high disk densities, with 30 drives in a 2U Open Rack chassis designed for easy

disk drive Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...

replacement. The 3.5 inch disks are stored in two drawers, five across and three deep in each drawer, with connections via serial attached SCSI. This storage is also called Knox, and there is also a cold storage variant where idle disks power down to reduce energy consumption. Another design concept was contributed by Hyve Solutions, a division of

Synnex Synnex was an American multinational corporation that provides information technology (IT) services to businesses. It merged with competitor Tech Data to form TD Synnex. It was founded in 1980 by Robert T. Huang and based in Fremont, Cali ...

in 2012. At the OCP Summit 2016 Facebook together with Taiwanese ODM Wistron's spin-off Wiwynn introduced Lightning, a flexible NVMe JBOF (just a bunch of flash), based on the existing Open Vault (Knox) design.

Rack designs

The designs for a mechanical mounting system have been published, so that open racks have the same outside width (600 mm) and depth as standard

19-inch rack A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple electronic equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide. The 19 inch dimension includes the edges or "ears" that protrude from each side of the equ ...

s, but are designed to mount wider chassis with a 537 mm width (21 inches). This allows more equipment to fit in the same volume and improves air flow. Compute chassis sizes are defined in multiples of an OpenU, which is 48 mm, slightly taller than the typical 44mm rack unit.

Energy efficient data centers

The OCP has published data center designs for energy efficiency. These include power distribution at 277 VAC, which eliminates one transformer stage in typical data centers, a single voltage (12.5 VDC) power supply designed to work with 277 VAC input, and 48 VDC battery backup.

Open networking switches

On May 8, 2013, an effort to define an open

network switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A netw ...

was announced. The plan was to allow Facebook to load its own

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

software onto the switch. Press reports predicted that more expensive and higher-performance switches would continue to be popular, while less expensive products treated more like a commodity (using the buzzword "top-of-rack") might adopt the proposal. The first attempt at an open networking switch by Facebook was designed together with Taiwanese ODM Accton using

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

Trident II chip and is called Wedge, the Linux OS that it runs is called FBOSS. Later switch contributions include "6-pack" and Wedge-100, based on Broadcom Tomahawk chips. Similar switch hardware designs have been contributed by: Edgecore Networks Corporation (Accton spin-off), Mellanox Technologies, Interface Masters Technologies, Agema Systems. Capable of running Open Network Install Environment (ONIE)-compatible

network operating system A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall. Historically operating systems with networking capabilities were described as network operating systems, because they al ...

s such as Cumulus Linux, Switch Light OS by Big Switch Networks, or PICOS by

Pica8 Pica8, Inc. is a computer networking company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Pica8 is a vendor of open-standards-based operating systems on white box network switches delivering software-defined networking (SDN) solutions fo ...

. A similar project for a custom switch for the Google platform had been rumored, and evolved to use the OpenFlow protocol.

Servers

Sub-project for Mezzanine ( NIC) OCP NIC 3.0 specification 1v00 was released in late 2019 establishing 3 form factors: SFF, TSFF, and LFF .

Litigation

In March, 2015, BladeRoom Group Limited and Bripco (UK) Limited sued Facebook, Emerson Electric Co. and others alleging that Facebook has disclosed BladeRoom and Bripco's trade secrets for prefabricated data centers in the Open Compute Project. Facebook petitioned for the lawsuit to be dismissed, but this was rejected in 2017. A confidential mid-trial settlement was agreed in April 2018.