Open Compute Developing Wider Rack Standard 237
1sockchuck writes "Are you ready for wider servers? The Open Compute Project today shared details on Open Rack, a new standard for hyperscale data centers, which will feature 21-inch server slots, rather than the traditional 19 inches. "We are ditching the 19-inch rack standard," said Facebook's Frank Frankovsky, who said the wider design offered better heat removal and a unified approach to power, including a 12 volt busbar. The Open Compute Project, developed by Facebook to advance open source hardware design, believes an open approach can avoid the mistakes of blade server chassis design."
already have 23" (Score:2, Interesting)
There's already a standard for 23" racks widely used in telecom. So now we have to deal with 19, 21, and 23 options? Great.
Re:Why invent a new standard? (Score:4, Interesting)
They should just dump the -12V requirement. They've had chips available for years that can supply +/-12V for RS232 ports; I believe the MAX232 from Maxim is one of them: you connect it to 5V data lines from your microcontroller, give it 5V for power, add in four capacitors, and it outputs +/-12V RS232 signals. I was using this chip back in the late 90s for embedded equipment that needed RS232 connectivity so we wouldn't need a power supply with -12V.
They should also dump the 3.3V requirement. AFAIK, that's only used for SATA hard drives, and even there most don't use it because they couldn't count on people actually having 3.3V-compliant power supplies, as many users were installing the (then-new) SATA drives into older computers and using Molex-to-SATA power adapters. 3.3V has a huge drop over any distance, so it makes much more sense to just use a DC-to-DC convertor at the point of use to convert 12V to 3.3V. Now that even CPUs want 12V instead of 5V, and high-end video cards have their own 12V connectors, it seems to me they should just dump all the other requirements altogether, and make a PC power supply only produce +12V, and have the motherboard and drives use their own DC-to-DC converters to produce whatever voltages they require.