The OpenStack Blog Everything in & around OpenStack in written words.

Today, Facebook announced a very exciting initiative called the Open Compute Project. It promises to open a vast amount of expertise to the market including the technology used in their servers, power supplies, server racks, battery backup systems and building design, and to do it as efficiently and as “green” as possible. And through collaboration with partners like Rackspace, Dell and Intel and the broader community overall — all of whom have substantial expertise in the underlying infrastructure of cloud — it promises to accelerate the overall industry knowledge base substantially. This is “open source” at its best. Open Compute is commoditizing and standardizing a layer that has traditionally been proprietary and secret, accessible only to a few. In opening this up to the world, we are not only able to consume it, but also collaborate and contribute to advance the project, so we all benefit from the best possible technology, processes and design.

We think this is huge news for the promise of open cloud. OpenStack is building the operating system upon which an open cloud can be built. But building and operating a cloud obviously requires more that just software. There are many other variables you must get right in order for OpenStack or any cloud operating system to be successful. I think everyone would agree that Facebook and their Open Compute partners have been successful at this. And now they are bringing us, the OpenStack community, in as collaborators.

OpenStack is proud to be collaborating with Open Compute to deliver something that is truly powerful for our communities. We are working with Facebook to assure OpenStack can run on top of their reference architectures. We are working with other community partners such as Dell to ensure organizations wanting to consume both projects can do so. And we are looking at how we can do more things together to deliver a truly open cloud to the world. There will be lots of opportunities for our two communities to work together, and we look forward to engaging with them going forward.

— Jim Curry