In Facebook's summary of the Open Compute Summit, they mention a community of presenters - Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, AMD, and Microsoft.
As a part of growing the community, the following people shared their perspectives:
- Joel Wineland and Bret Piatt from Rackspace shared their thoughts on how Open Compute Project servers could fit into their data center business. What was really awesome is that Rackspace benchmarked our Open Compute Project AMD 1.0 servers against their own off-the-shelf hardware, and our servers did very well. For the first time, independent, external feedback on our designs was shared with the community! Rackspace also expressed what they would like to see this community do: to be ambitious and, most of all, to innovate.
- Grant Richard and Matthew Liste from Goldman Sachs presented their vision of OCP hardware filling a big role in their large scale compute clusters and, more importantly, how hardware from multiple Open Compute Project vendors could dramatically improve their ability to manage their systems, which are much more heterogeneous than ours.
- Bob Ogrey from AMD presented interest in Open Compute technology from China and other countries in East Asia, and discussed how AMD intends to open up their motherboard design files to ODMs in the near future.
- Dileep Bhandarkar from Microsoft shared his experiences building modular data centers, comparing and contrasting with the data center and server designs from the Open Compute Project. Most importantly, Dileep presented a number of technological areas Microsoft is potentially interested in engaging with the Open Compute Project going forward.
To continue the community effort Frank announced they will launch the Open Compute Foundation.
To help facilitate collaboration, Frank also announced our intention to create a non-profit foundation with roles ranging from using this hardware to building it to actually contributing to the specifications and leading entire projects. While all of the details aren't yet worked out, each project will be separate, allowing you to choose exactly the areas where you want to contribute and want to avoid. These projects must embody the four tenets of efficiency, economy, environmental friendliness, and openness that have driven the Open Compute project from the start. Projects and hardware sold based on these designs must be aligned with these core tenets before they can call themselves "Open Compute."
