Facebook decided three years ago to open-source its server and datacentre designs to drive down costs and drive up efficiencies in the datacentre. Today, the Open Compute Project – the open-source foundation it launched to champion the cause of ‘vanity-free’ servers and storage for the datacentre – has the support of organisations like Goldman Sachs, Rackspace and Microsoft.

Between them, the project’s members buy hundreds of thousands of servers and have the market power to bend hardware vendors to their collective will. Their goal is to push the vendors to build cooler-running, more energy-efficient hardware that packs more computing density per square metre than current servers and storage. It flips the IT industry paradigm from one where vendors used to lead technology innovation to one where enterprise IT users are in the driver’s seat.

The essential promise from the members of Open Compute is that if they align behind a design, vendors can be sure that they’ll buy products based on it. Some examples of the work the Open Compute community has done include designs for energy-efficient servers, a 100-percent air-side economiser and evaporative cooling system, server chassis and racks, and even an open-source switch.