While reading an article from Wired, where they were interviewing Facebook and their development of their new open source switches running on smaller, simpler hardware, I came across a project that I found rather interesting. It’s called the Open Compute Project. Their main mission is to create a forum where innovation and collaboration can occur between different organizations across the world to increase the performance, scalability, and ease of deployment for multiple system types across the IT estate.

Historically, from my perspective as I’ve gone through IT, the method of deployment is too cumbersome. There are too many groups involved that have different request processes and too many dependencies where resources can become tied up in trying to deploy systems and services. On top of that with many of the different platforms out there, many of them require specific training and are cumbersome to configure and understand. Also the adding costs of infrastructure is reducing the ability of IT departments to scale at the rate they need. Seeing the types of equipment that members of the OCP are developing, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, is encouraging. They are developing simple platforms that allow for high bandwidth and the ability for tools that currently manage server infrastructure to also manage the networking infrastructure. Many tools are out there to manage large scale deployments of Linux servers as well as automate changes from templates that are created by each respective IT departments. This is definitely something of interest for many companies, as the time to deployment right now is too long and too costly. Granted, with a well managed virtual machine environment and a network that is designed properly from the ground up you can get around the time consumption, but it is all still very costly from a budgeting perspective. If you are more interesting in reading about what they have done, I’ve included links below.

Facebook Now Runs on Networking Gear Designed by Its Own Engineers
Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco
Going With the Flow: Google’s Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking
Open Compute Project