A growing throng of Open Compute Project (OCP) disciples converged on Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, this week to overturn the established sixty-year-old EIA 310-D rack standard inherited from railroad signaling relays and telephone switching and in its place substitute Open Rack, the very first standard for data centers, especially big hyper-scale data centers like Facebook\u2019s.
\nFacebook set Open Compute in train a year ago to solve problems it was having trying to shoehorn the compute, storage and networking density it needed into the traditional server rack, a form factor its hardware master calls \u201cblades gone bad.\u201d
\nBlades supposedly go bad because of what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls \u201cgratuitous differentiation\u201d on the part of vendors and their lock-in-seeking proprietary designs that sacrifice interoperability.<\/p>\n