Can Open Hardware Transform the Data Center?

1sockchuck writes "Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building these facilities? This week the Open Compute Project gained momentum and structure, forming a foundation as it touted participation from IT heavyweights Intel, Dell, Amazon, Facebook, Red Hat and Rackspace. That turnout is not an isolated event, but reflects a growing focus on collaborative projects to reduce cost, timelines and inefficiency in data center construction and operation. The Open Compute project is just one of a handful of initiatives to bring standards and repeatable designs to IT infrastructure."

Re:facebook

[SharkLaser]

I don't really see how Facebook is a walled garden company. Yes, they don't open up their own most important platform, but if that makes them walled garden company then Google is too. They both do, however, contribute large amounts of code and side-projects (especially in high performance web services side), and Facebook goes even further and opens up their datacenter infrastructure too. Like you said, Google keeps that secret.

You may not like Facebook's other practices, but they do actually contribute a lot to open source. Much more than any other company.