Google Joins Open Compute Project to Render Powerful Rack Design

PALO ALTO, CA: Google announces its alliance with the Open Compute Project (OCP), the joint venture will contribute in a new design and form factor that will allow OCP racks to fit into Google’s data centers. It will offer48V power distribution to rack computing.

The Open Compute community is established collection of consumers and producers and was founded in 2011 to share designs of servers and other data center equipments. Many companies have joined the project and contributed their hardware designs.

Power Efficiency for Data center

Google has been promoting efficient power supply to the racks in data center since 2003 and deployed 12V architecture (the infrastructure that supports andpowers rows upon rows of our servers) inside their data center in 2006.

Google began producing 48V design in 2010 which helped in boosting efficiency and performance for high-end computing products such as high-power CPUs and GPUs. 48V infrastructure was at least 30% more energy efficient and more cost effective so they evolved their servers with 48V to point–of-load design and rack level 48V Li-Ion UPS systems.

Next-Gen power infrastructure

Machine learning is one area that's requiring higher-power workload. “We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google” says John Zipfel, Technical Program Manager, Google, “it is only a first step for the company, we are looking at other possible areas of collaboration with OCP”.

Google could contribute in developing better disk distribution solution for cloud based application and standardizing server and networking management systems.

A number of other companies, including Microsoft, Arista, Broadcom, Dell, and Mellanox, also announced that they will be contributing networking components to the project.