ODCA Meets OCP To Accelerate Data Centre Greening

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has announced that it will work with the Open Compute Project (OCP) on selected projects relating to data centre systems design. In return, the ODCA will allow access to its customer base for testing the Open Compute hardware.

The overall aim of the partnership is to improve the efficiency of hardware and to innovate, using ODCA’s over 300 customers to test new hardware and suggest improvements.

Spurning The Hardware Makers

The OCP grew out of Facebook’s decision to share its own  efficient hardware designs – variations on vendors equiment which reduce power demands and materials used in its data centres. Allowing others to use and comment on these designs, the social media firm hoped to stimulate discusson and get energy-efficient ideas adopted faster.

Richard Dicketts, vice president and global head of infrastructure outsourcing operations at Capgemini, and member of the ODCA board of directors, said, “The Open Data Center Alliance was founded to accelerate delivery of the most pressing data centre technology requirements for cloud computing in an open standards-based approach. The initial release of our first member-developed usage model requirements earlier this summer signalled that we were beginning to deliver on this vision.”

The OCP is an initiative pushed by Facebook to share developments it, and was formed in April 2011 following Facebook’s policy of designing customised hardware for its massive new developments.

Many large data centres, especially ISPs, spurn the general-purpose servers from the larger manufacturers and Facebook’s idea was to pool this information.

Frank Frankovsky, a founding member of the Open Compute Project and director of hardware design at Facebook, said, “The Open Compute Project was founded to bring together a community of engineers who are passionate about defining and delivering the most efficient server, storage and data centre designs. The collaboration between ODCA and OCP offers a unique opportunity to focus the best minds in the industry at this critical challenge.”

The ODCA was founded by Intel in October 2010 to co-ordinate standards development for cloud computing installations.