Google announced it's joined the Open Compute Project, started by Facebook to develop open source, modular IT infrastructure. Google said it will contribute a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into its data centres. Google has been working on the power technology for over ten years as part of efforts to improve server energy efficiency.
The company said this is a "first step in a larger effort" and it sees other areas for collaboration with OCP. For example, it's already working with the industry on finding better disk solutions for cloud-based applications. With OCP, Google said it could go further, looking up the software stack to standardize server and networking management systems.
Google's announcement was made at the Open Compute Summit taking place in the US. Urs Holzle, SVP of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google shared the news at the summit.
