Submitted by Microsoft has joined the Open Compute Project, a consortium that Facebook created to share the designs of servers and other equipment that power the internet’s largest data centers.
Like other internet giants, Microsoft designs its own servers to be more efficient than standard boxes sold by the likes of HP and Dell. While Google has mostly kept its designs secret, Facebook has made its server and rack specifications public and has urged others to do the same. In theory, companies can swap best practices, and any vendor can sell servers identical to the ones that power Facebook’s data centers.
Microsoft joining Open Compute boosts the chances that the project might have some impact on the server industry.
Good move.
They went with the Apache license (v2.0) for their source contributions, which I guess is slightly surprising, since Microsoft has it’s own OSI-approved license (MS-PL).
While the Apache license is far more suitable than MS-PL for these pieces of software, which are just various chassis control mechanisms (Fan speed, external LEDs, etc), I’m surprised Microsoft didn’t roll their own license with identical terms anyways.
Looks to me like many original works on Github from Microsoft (MSOpenTech) use an Apache license:
https://github.com/MSOpenTech/azure-sdk-for-php/blob/master/LICENSE….
https://github.com/MSOpenTech/azure-activedirectory-library-for-ios/…
May be they started taking first steps in learning common sense?
Microsoft’s Microsoft Pubic License (MS-PL) is actually a good license – BSD/Apache-like, only with a patent sharing clause.
It’s also simple, written to be used by users and programmers, unlike some OSI licenses that are essentially incomprehensible to anybody not a lawyer.
I’m looking at you, Apple.
Nope, Zlib-Png license is even more sane…
Kochise
I pointed out the same on slashdot. You can see the rest of discussion there:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4723221&cid=46090199
…make me wish I had a few million dollars to invest in my own data center.
Almost every part of the stack interests me, software, hardware, networking, storage, energy distribution, redundancy, etc.
You know, you can also just work in that field. You don’t have to have a lot of money to do interesting stuff.
If you like where you life, try to find a large hosting provider nearby and work there. They face similar problems.
Lennie,
There are datacenters closer to the city, 1-2hrs away, but I hear what you are saying. I would be surprised if any of them were designing their own rackmount blade servers though. They’re probably just using the same Dell/HP/etc gear that I can already play with, using the software they’re provided (Dell’s OpenManage, HP’s iLO, etc) and deploying existing software stacks like parallels, vmware, etc. I don’t think normal data centers do the kind of R&D I’m referring to even though they’re obviously users of those products.
I guess companies like amazon that build their own stacks would be ideal. I’d want to be meaningfully involved in the design though, not simply following whims of those higher up the pyramid. This is why it helps to have your own money
My own servers are colocated hundreds of miles away because we’re prone to yearly flooding, hurricanes, and power outages. I’ve set up my own redundant data backup network and sell this as a service to clients. Several thousand more clients would give me the economic viability to operate my own data center!
Edited 2014-01-30 00:53 UTC
Actually OVH and Rackspace are large enough. They do not use HP, Dell or Supermicro (at least not for everything).
Rackspace is involved with Open Compute Project and uses that in production.
OVH created their own water cooling systems/machines/racks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSPeEFPLHvA
In this video you get a better view:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfw0yoy6lIQ
Rackspace wasn’t really a software company either, but they are one of the founding members of OpenStack.
I work at a smaller hosting provider and we’re deploying OpenStack and building software around it too. The plan is to use OpenStack to do the bare-metal installation, network hardware configuration and manage and install everything with it including all the Windows stuff.
Today I figured out to install a cloud-environment from scratch, starting with just the baremetal all you really need is a smartphone or tablet with a SD-card with all the software and scripts on it and a USB-cable and a monitor to see if the baremetal is installing correctly and no Internet access needed.
Automate all the things.
Edited 2014-01-30 09:19 UTC
The Patents for a Blade Server given to MS last week?
Is it a case of, ‘here this is a nigty design’
and later, ‘oh by the way that will be $1M license fees for using our patented design’
I read the MS press release twice and it seems to me that a statement about this ‘relationship’ was missing.
I’d like to think that MS is being altruistic but their track record says differently.
Finally, how might this new openesss sit with their new CEO? How long might it last. you only have to look at the rotting carcass of Sun that is left open now?
Normally one arm of a large company doesn’t know what the other is doing.
Also they’ve been open sourcing quite a lot of stuff recently.
There is a comment on the ars article that puts it well (by Brainling).
As an ASP.NET dev, since .NET 3.5 everything has changed massively and they have pulled a lot of ideas from the *nix and RoR.
Edited 2014-01-29 08:24 UTC
Microsoft contracts cancer; news at nine.
Yeah well it was inevitable. Once you use tools like NPM, GIT etc going back to TFS and not having a package manager, things become a chore.
Edited 2014-01-29 14:17 UTC
And Docker
Open standards tend to be used by collections of smaller competitors to fight against the established monopolies. Hence in the server space Google uses closed standards and Microsoft is now backing open ones. We can likely see more ‘friendly’ moves by Microsoft as soon as it no longer has market dominance in the PC space. I may not like what the company is at present, but I can easily see liking Microsoft in the future as this trend continues. Perhaps the reverse for Google.
Some aditional information and guessing/comments on this subject:
http://turingsman.net/my-blog-list/178-microsoft-joins-ocp-project-…
In fact, this is a quite important news! Especially, for all data center professionals.