Apple joins Facebook's Open Computing Program to help build open hardware and data center architecture

[[129394]]

The news about Apple's newly launched Apple Watch has become a major focus of the consumer market. However, another important news was revealed in the Internet circle in recent days. At the OCP Summit 2015 held in the United States on Tuesday (3/10), Apple officially joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) team led by Facebook. In the future, it will not only use open source architecture to build lower-cost data centers, but will also help provide open source hardware and data center architecture design to accelerate the promotion of the open hardware market.

OCP is a non-profit project established by Facebook in 2011. It aims to create the most efficient computing architecture at the lowest cost, covering servers, storage, data centers and networks. It invites the industry to participate in the event in the form of open hardware and software, including more than 50 software and hardware companies such as Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, VMware, etc. Companies such as Broadcom, Intel, Mellanox and Accton have contributed switch hardware design, and Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks have also donated switch software.

The news of Apple joining OCP was revealed by Frank Frankovsy, chairman and president of the OCP Foundation, at the conference. He also said that Apple has very outstanding infrastructure engineering personnel and has been involved in OCP project projects for some time.

After Apple becomes a member of OCP, it will use these open specifications and designs based on open source project in the future to help create more open source hardware and data center architecture designs, and accelerate the promotion of the open hardware market.

In fact, Apple's joining the OCP team is also seen as having important symbolic significance because in the past, Apple has always shown a resolute determination to defend its hardware assets, whether it was the early Macintosh computers or the later iPad and iPhone, all of which adopted a closed hardware architecture design.

But this time, Apple broke its usual practice and announced that it would join the OCP program, taking the initiative to contribute the architectural design of its own open source hardware. The main reason is that Apple has not only launched a series of Apple products in the past few years, but also provided various online services to consumers, such as iTunes, App Store, etc. In order to serve more than 10 billion users worldwide each year, it has to expand more data center infrastructure at the back end to support existing online applications and services.

By adopting open source hardware architecture, Apple not only gains the ability to customize hardware and no longer needs to be locked into software and hardware by traditional suppliers, but it can also select the design that best suits its needs from multiple suppliers of the same specifications and hardware, helping to reduce the hardware and operating costs of building data centers.

Apple is not the only new member of OCP announced this time. Other members include suppliers such as network communication giants Cisco, Juniper, HP and Schneider Electric, and even American financial companies such as Bank of America and Capital One have joined the program.

Apple's current data center locations in Prineville, Oregon and Maiden, North Carolina are not far from Facebook's data center.