Google Works With Facebook To Release First OCP Designs

Google has served up its first Open Compute Project (OCP) efforts since joining the consortium in March.

In collaboration with Facebook, Google has shared its plans for an ‘Open Rack v2.0 Standard’ – a proposed standard that specifies a 48V power architecture with a modular, shallow-depth form factor.

Small form factor

Designed for data centres with ‘limited space’, the standard could be used by any data centre customer willing to adopt an OCP state of mind.

“Google developed a 48V ecosystem with payloads utilizing 48V to Point-of-Load technology and has extensively deployed these high-efficiency, high-availability systems since 2010,” said Google this week.

“We have seen significant reduction in losses and increased efficiency compared to 12V solutions. The improved SPUE with 48V has saved Google millions of dollars and kilowatt hours.”

Google said its contributions to the Open Rack Standard are based on its experiences advancing the 48V architecture both with its internal teams as well as industry partners.

The plans are currently in a review stage for OCP members, and if approved by the OCP later in the year, will become Google’s first contributions to the OCP community.

Amazon is now one of the only infrastructure giants not in the OCP club after Google joined in March.

“The Open Compute community is an established collection of consumers and producers, and we see an opportunity to contribute our experience and expand the Open Rack specification,” wrote John Zipfel, Technical Program Manager at Google, on Google’s announcement.

“Today’s launch is a first step in a larger effort. We think there are other areas of possible collaboration with OCP. We’ve recently begun engaging the industry to identify better disk solutions for cloud based applications. And we think that we can work with OCP to go even further, looking up the software stack to standardize server and networking management systems. We look forward to new and exciting advancements to come with the OCP community.”

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