Google joins Facebook’s Open Compute Project, proposes new design for server racks

Google has joined Facebook's Open Compute Project and proposed a new design for server racks that could help cloud data centres cut their energy bills.

The social network started OCP six years ago as a for end-user companies to team up and design their own data centre equipment, free of the features that were not required and which drove up costs for traditional vendor products.

Other big cloud providers such Microsoft joined up, but Google, known for operating some of the world's most advanced data centres, stayed away.

Yesterday at the OCP Summit in Silicon Valley, it said it had now joined in.

The search company's first contribution would be a new rack design that distributes power to servers at 48 volts, as against the 12 volts that was common in most data centres. The increase would help to accommodate more powerful computing equipment.

According to Google, the new design was more efficient than its old 12-volt system as it reduced electrical conversion losses by 30 per cent.

According to Google, it had deployed thousands of racks in its own data centres so the technology was ready for widespread use.

"The key thing that we figured out was, to get the efficiency in cost and power, you have to directly feed the 48 volts to the motherboard and convert it only in one step," Urs Holzle, the senior vice president in charge of Google's infrastructure, said at the OCP Summit.

"So these workloads have only one AC-to-DC transformation step, and you step down the 48 volts -- for example, at the CPU -- to around 1 volt."

"Today, Google joined the Open Compute Project. Google has always built some of the best infrastructure in the industry, so this is strong symbolic move that our open model of development is the best way forward for everyone," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Thursday.

"Until five years ago, the largest technology companies all designed their data centres and computing infrastructure in secret. They viewed this technology as a competitive advantage to beat others in the industry," he added.