Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) was the social media company's initiative to open up its data center technology to the rest of the world. Heavyweight tech companies joined the fray, including Microsoft, Intel, Rackspace and Apple.
There were two holdouts among the largest Internet companies, namely Google and Amazon, which have kept their data center designs all to themselves. Google, however, has now left Amazon alone by joining the OCP today at the Open Compute Project Summit.
In the past, Google would voluntarily share some of the designs of its servers and data centers via white papers, but the company would still keep the majority of its inner workings to itself. The secrecy behind its data centers was one of the competitive advantages it had over companies just like Facebook.
Now as Google joins the OCP, the search company's first major contribution to the group will be its 48-volt rack power distribution architecture. These are more advanced than the current 12-volt designs used in most other data centers, as these are able to support higher-performance computing systems while being more energy-efficient and cost-effective.
Google has been using the 48-volt designs for years so the technology is more than ready for more widespread use outside of Google's data centers.
"We feel comfortable with the robustness of the design and its reliability," says John Zipfel, Technical Program Manager at Google.
Besides sharing hardware, Google's SVP in charge of infrastructure Urs Holzle said at the Open Compute Project Summit that the company also has other OCP projects in mind. These include the standardization of software, alternatives to SNMP (which is used to share operational data inside data centers) and redesigning disk drives used in cloud data centers to better work together.
By combining their knowledge, these companies ultimately help forward technology to the next level in various areas such as artificial intelligence. Making AI happen at a worldwide scale will require a level of collaboration great enough to make a massive neural network work.
It's not only Google giving to the group, however. Facebook is also sharing its designs for a GPU-based system that powers its networks, while Intel and Microsoft are also expected to submit some of their technologies during the OCP event.
