Operating at Web scale, and doing so as efficiently as possible, is the next great challenge facing the IT industry. The Open Compute Project was formed to help us all meet that challenge; it's our hope that adopting an "open source" approach to building servers, storage, power supplies, and data centers will ultimately lead to more innovation in and collaboration on infrastructure design and efficiency.
Of course, this is a huge undertaking -- one that no single organization could possibly tackle alone. And with that in mind, we're thrilled to announce a collaboration with the Open Data Center Alliance that will enable the OCP to get its hardware and designs in front of the 300-plus members of the ODCA so they can evaluate, adopt, and innovate on them.
To begin, the two groups will work together on projects focused on rack-scale infrastructure; efficient server and storage designs; and scalable, open systems management. The collaboration will deepen over time, and we should have more details to share at the upcoming Open Compute Project Summit in New York on October 27 (which you can register for here).
We have a long way to go in figuring out what the next generations of Web infrastructure should look like. But the kinds of openness and collaboration exemplified by today's announcement are exactly what we need to get there.