Rackspace: Open Compute Not Only Cheaper, It's Also Denser

Provider builds cloud infrastructure on open-source hardware

Slightly more than a year has passed since the Open Compute Project (OCP) announced Open Rack, and slightly more than two years has passed since a small group of engineers at Facebook kicked off the open-source hardware-design project, telling the world that data center users did not have to be beholden to the standards dictated by the few incumbent OEMs on the IT market.

Today we are starting to see the principles and, more importantly, the designs propagated through OCP come to life within the walls of data centers other than Facebook’s. Rackspace has become one of the first companies to deploy Open Compute servers and apply the idea of the “disaggregated rack” at scale to support its cloud-infrastructure offerings.

Mark Roenigk, COO at the San Antonio, Texas-based data center hosting and cloud services company, says the racks and the servers the company has deployed in its Northern Virginia data center are its own designs that are based on Open Compute.