Is vendor lock-in a problem to solve or should you manage your purchases better?

CIO magazine has a post on the Open Compute Project and how it takes aim at vendor lock-in.

Facebook Data Center Project Takes Aim At Vendor Lock-in

Facebook's Open Compute Project aims to reduce 'gratuitous differentiation' among IT vendors

By Joab Jackson
Thu, October 27, 201

IDG News Service — By launching the Open Compute Project as a stand-alone foundation, Facebook is hoping to further standardize the market for data center equipment, thereby reducing costs and vendor lock-in, the new foundation's board members said at a press conference Thursday.

"What has been missing here has been standardization at the systems level," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, an OCP board member who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later was the first major investor in Google. He railed against "gratuitous differentiation" on the part of server vendors, who each have their own unique chassis or some other component that prevents users from intermingling the equipment with gear from other vendors.

 


 

But are vendors really the problem or is it how companies make their purchases the problem? The smart data center guys are looking at the hardware purchases and data center designs as a complete system and they need engineering talent in the company to design the systems and choose the right hardware.

You could blame the vendors, but they are doing what any company would do figuring out how to maximize their profits, and differentiate their products vs. others.

Are vendors reacting to the way customers buy or are vendors defining how customers buy?  Facebook is drawing attention to what happens if hardware designs are open sourced.  But as Kevin Heslin asked last week at the Open Compute Project, how does the foundation determine what is open sourced and what is not?

Is Open Source Hardware the answer or is it how companies purchase?  Think about it.  Buying Open Compute hardware changes the purchasing process.

 

Open Compute Project as a lower cost model, Rackspace and Facebook

Rackspace and Facebook are on the board of the Open Compute project.  SeekingAlpha has post on the open source process both of these companies embrace.

Rackspace Doubles Down On Open Source Process

Open source has been vital in creating the cloud. The open source process allowed many companies to use what began as Google's (GOOG) MapReduce, evolving it into things like Hadoop (originally a Yahoo (YHOO) project), entire cloud stacks like Red Hat's (RHT) OpenShift, and services like Amazon's (AMZN) EC2 in relatively short order.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The author drills to the bottom line of why Open Compute?  lower costs.

Strip away its adherence to the open source ethos, after all, and Rackspace is just a hosting vendor, no different from hundreds of other small hosting companies like Westhost or SoftLayer. At some point this competition will come down to costs, as usage of the resource scales exponentially. Low cost infrastructure will win.

Right now costs are not the key issue in the cloud. Right monetization is the issue. That's why every vendor – from Oracle (ORCL) to Dell (DELL) to Apple (AAPL) – can call what they do “cloud.” But as usage increases 10 times, then 100 times and 1,000 times, what seem like small differences in costs now will become magnified into big differences in profitability.

One way to look at Open Compute Project is it is an effort to build a lower cost data center ecosystem.

Open source, and the Open Compute project, put Rackspace at the forefront of these changes. They are key to its long term survival.

 

Google vs. Facebook European data center locations

One way to look at Google vs. Facebook European data center locations is to plot on a map the sites.

A - Google Dublin

B- Google Hamina, Finland

C - Google Belgium

D - Facebook Lulea, Sweden

Google has three major data center sites.  In Asia, Google has three future sites - Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  Recognize a pattern?  Three is a good number, says GreenM3 :-)

Keep in mind given Google has built its three data centers it most likely looked at sites all over Europe before it picked its three locations.  Think about being in three sites as an option to building one mega site.  I watched an established company follow the advice of the so called data center experts justifying a single site as their first data center.  For less than 10 MW, it can make a lot of sense to have three 3 1/3 MW sites to enable geo redundancy of services.

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Who is building Facebook's Sweden Data Center? DPR Construction

Chatting with data center executives we laugh how vendors will call for weeks after a data center project is announced.  For those of you looking up Facebook's data center construction staff like Dan Lee here presenting at Facebook's Open Compute Project in NYC.

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Don't keep your hopes to high.  DPR Construction has a press announcement that they are the construction company for Facebook's Sweden Data Center.

DPR Construction to Build Facebook's Sweden Data Center

Construction to Commence This Month on Social Networking Giant's First Data Center Outside the U.S.

 

 

REDWOOD CITY, CA, Oct 27, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- DPR Construction, one of the nation's top technical builders and a leading builder of data centers, has been awarded a $121 million contract from Facebook to construct a data center in Lulea, Sweden. The project will be constructed in a joint venture between NCC Construction Sweden and Fortis Construction in Portland. This is the first of three data centers planned for the area.

With construction commencing this month, the 300,000-square-foot project is scheduled for completion in December 2012. Facebook has imposed stringent energy-classification requirements, and the data center will be certified in accordance with LEED Gold-level certification.