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Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires

Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Half a decade ago, Jonathan Heiliger compared the world of Internet data centers to Fight Club.

It was the spring of 2011, and the giants of the Internet—including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—were erecting a new kind of data center. Their online empires had grown so large that they could no longer rely on typical hardware from the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM. They needed hardware that was cheaper, more streamlined, and more malleable. So, behind the scenes, they designed this hardware from scratch and had it manufactured through little-known companies in Asia.

This shadow hardware market was rarely discussed in public. Companies like Google saw their latest data center hardware as a competitive advantage best kept secret from rivals. But then Facebook tore off the veil. It open sourced its latest server and data center designs, freely sharing them with the world under the aegis of a new organization called the Open Compute Project. “It’s time to stop treating data center design like Fight Club and demystify the way these things are built,” said Heiliger, then the vice president of technical operations at Facebook. 

Google was the first company to rethink data center design for the modern age.

With the Open Compute Project, Facebook aimed to create a whole community of companies that would freely share their data center designs, hoping to accelerate the evolution of Internet hardware and, thanks to the economies of scale, drive down the cost of this hardware. That, among other things, boosts the Facebook bottom line. It worked—in a very big way. Microsoft soon shared its designs too. Companies like HP and Quanta began selling this new breed of streamlined gear. And businesses as diverse as Rackspace and Goldman Sachs used this hardware to expand their own massive online operations. Even Apple—that bastion of secrecy—eventually joined the project.

Two big holdouts remained: Google and Amazon. But today, that number dropped to one. At the annual Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, Google announced that it too has joined the project. And it’s already working with Facebook on a new piece of open source hardware.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Aedanf Zane's curator insight, March 10, 2016 6:21 AM

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Gerald Black's curator insight, March 10, 2016 9:27 AM

Open Compute has been transformative since day 1, and with Google finally joining, the number of missing elephants in the room has dramatically reduced.

What still puzzles me is the loud silence of European players in the field although we have a tremendous breed of companies and talent in that space. #HardwareIsNotDead

Agra hotal's curator insight, March 10, 2016 11:27 AM

Book Now Hotel with cheap rate near Tajmahal on http://www.hotelatagra.com

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Facebook's Open Compute guru Frank Frankovsky leaves to build optical storage startup

Facebook's Open Compute guru Frank Frankovsky leaves to build optical storage startup | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s vice president of hardware design and supply chain optimization, who helped oversee the development and growth of the company’s custom server effort, has left the social networking company to form his own as-yet-unnamed startup that will focus on building optical storage for the enterprise.

In an interview, Frankovsky said he had resigned from Facebook last week to pursue this idea. Meanwhile, Jason Taylor, Facebook’s director of infrastructure, has assumed responsibility for the hardware design and supply chain teams at Facebook and will continue working with the Open Compute Project on Facebook’s behalf.

Taylor has been overseeing much of that work for the last year, according to Facebook, and he will also be joining the Open Compute Foundation board along with Bill Laing, corporate VP of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. This brings the OCP Foundation board from five to seven participants. Frankovsky, who will remain chairman and president of the OCP board, will stay as an independent member.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Hardware is not dead. It is just evolving #OCP

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Open Compute, un Investissement d'Avenir pour le Cloud Souverain et l'industrie française

Open Compute, un Investissement d'Avenir pour le Cloud Souverain et l'industrie française | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

La prochaine révolution informatique à grande échelle a démarré à partir du projet OCP (Open Compute Project), démarré en 2011 par Facebook avec le soutien notamment de Microsoft et Goldman Sachs (saviez-vous que cette banque dispose de sa propre équipe d'ingénieurs en charge de concevoir leurs serveurs?) qui ont pour objectif d’être au matériel ce que l’open source est au logiciel. Il s’agit de repartir des besoins des clients finaux et de désintermédier les fabricants (OEM) de serveurs comme HP, Dell ou Lenovo en certifiant directement des configurations matérielles adaptées au client et à ses objectifs de coûts.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Comme le dit Cole Crawford, Directeur Executif de la Fondation Open Compute, "Splitted Desktop is in a critically unique position within Europe.  They have led the charge in driving Open Compute technologies into the region. We will be relying heavily on Jean Marie and his team to produce and promote the world's most efficient computing environments".

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Social Login Trends Across the Web for Q4 2013 | Janrain

Social Login Trends Across the Web for Q4 2013 | Janrain | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

During the past five years, the ability to register and log in on websites with a social network or email identity has become increasingly prevalent. In fact, 90% of people have encountered social login before, and more than half of people use it. Because it makes the account creation and login process so much faster and easier and eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password, it’s no surprise that social login has become so popular.

 

But which networks are people most likely to choose? How do these preferences differ based on the type of sites people visit? We all use multiple social networks for different purposes. Facebook is generally where we interact with our close friends and family. LinkedIn is where we maintain our professional persona. Google+ lets us do both, by letting us organize our social graph and content we share into circles. We use Twitter to follow influencers, share opinions, and read about topics of interest. And Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft are our primary means of privately communicating with others via email.

 

For four years, Janrain has published quarterly reports to shed light on consumer preferences for social login, with data aggregated from the websites that use Janrain. The key takeaway, above all else, is that people want choice. In other words, there is not a single identity provider to rule them all.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Interestingly, the real "camembert" does not match what I thought it would look like. My techdom bias would have led me to expect to a smaller G+ and a quite larger Twitter & LinkedIn share...

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