January 22, 2013, 3:40 PM — At the Open Compute Foundation summit held this week, Rackspace announced that it is following in the footsteps of founding OCF member Facebook and will build its own compute and storage servers based on the open standards the foundation has lobbied for.
Rackspace plans to roll out the new OCF-based servers in its newest east coast data center, which it hopes to open in the first half of this year, says company COO Mark Roenigk.
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At the OCF event, Facebook announced a new model that allows companies to build their own customized hardware using commodity hardware pieces that all comply to OCF standards. This building system allows organizations to buy less expensive commodity equipment compared to proprietary hardware from companies the likes of Dell, HP and Cisco. Roenigk says ultimately that will create efficiencies for Rackspace, including having hardware that is customized specifically to the company's needs.
Facebook founded the OCF and other members include Google, Goldman Sachs, eBay and Intel. EMC announced at the foundation's conference this week in Santa Clara that it has joined the OCF.
Rackspace released the details of the servers it hopes to assemble, which include three separate types and a rack for holding them. The Wiwynn server design, code named Winterfell, will include a 3-sled chassis with 2x16 core CPUs, 256 GiB RAM and 2x10 Gigabit Ethernet.
