Facebook’s Wide Racks Show The Triumph Of The Cloud

It is still possible to find cloud sceptics who think the cloud is too risky. You can even find deluded souls who believe it’s not happening in their organisation, and they can keep it out.

But they are wrong and we have proof. No, it’s not Meg Whitman’s statement that cloud marks a seismic shift in the IT industry, so much so she can “feel the earth move under her feet”. Although her words  had some truth to them (and the image of her channelling Carol King brightened an otherwise strangely apocalyptic speech in London yesterday), there is a real-world project that offers us real proof that cloud is shaking things up.

You changed what?

A green initiative started by Facebook is about to change one of the IT industry’s longest established certainties, one of its  few fixed points.

Facebook’s Open Compute initiative has proposed a change to the 19 inch rackmout equipment standard.

This is serious stuff. The 19-inch rack predates the IT industry itself. It was designed for railway signalling equipment. Since then the audio and TV industries, as well as the military, have settled on equipment which is 19 inches wide, and the IT industry’s server rooms have followed suit.

Until now. Open Compute is a group of large users and cloud providers who are using their buying power to demand that equipment makers trim back on the extras and produce more efficient systems.

The physical spaces in data centres are built around racks which are 24 inches wide, and Open Compute has pointed out that within this span, there is room for more. It wants equipment which is 21 inches wide, to pack more kit into the same space, and reduce the overheads in the server rooms.

Open Compute could well  be making the earth tremble for Meg Whitman – Facebook, Google and the rest increasingly don’t go to vendors like HP for the high density servers in their data centres. They go to Far Eastern contract manufacturers, who build servers by the thousand to custom specifications

Open Compute shared those specifications and will combine the buying power of cloud providers. And the result is a new class of equipment, built for efficiency and defined by customers.

Some analysts’ projections suggest that these densely-deployed servers will ultimately be a bigger market than 19-inch “enterprise” servers.

That may or may not happen. Consider this, though. Cloud players have created a new standard that redefines one of the industry’s underlying assumptions.

Now tell me that cloud isn’t happening.

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