Open Compute: Rackspace Designs Own Servers Using Open-Source Facebook Specs

Shows you don’t have to be Google to bypass HP or Dell in the hardware supply chain

Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting and cloud-infrastructure providers, is on its way to becoming the first company of a kind other than the web giants of Google’s and Facebook’s caliber to stray away from buying servers and storage gear from traditional IT vendors – such as HP or Dell – choosing instead to design its own gear and use the same manufacturers those traditional vendors use to make it.

While Facebooks, Googles and, reportedly, Amazon’s of the world do all their server design work in-house, Rackspace went about it the way so many software companies have gone about building software products for years: using collective wisdom (and technology) of the open-source community.

Designs for the next generation of hardware to run in San Antonio, Texas-based company’s data centers are based on designs available to the public through the Open Compute Project (OCP), an open-source hardware and data center design community Facebook started in 2011 (also a first-of-its-kind). Facebook kicked off OCP by opening to the public design documents for servers it had created for its own data centers...