During the summit, Open Compute Summit, Apple announced its decision to join the project Open Compute Project (OCP) for the development of free hardware to be started Facebook in 2011, according to Nixp. In addition to the iPhone maker's initiative was supported by Cisco and Juniper Networks.
Apple's decision came as a surprise journalists, as the company focuses on proprietary technologies. Experts express quite logical assumption about the reasons for such a decision by the company from Cupertino. If the products to the end user from Apple (Mac, iPad, iPhone) has always been proprietary and is likely to remain so in the future, to ensure that they work need powerful data centers, maintenance costs which are very high. Translation of these same data center on free solutions can play a significant role in reducing this cost.
As for Cisco and Juniper, their interest in the Open Compute Project is due to the fact that their monopoly on the market of network infrastructure was shattered with the release of the standard equipment for data centers based on the architecture x86, developed in the framework of OCP. Switching equipment that meets this standard was established Intel. A year earlier, there was a first prototype modular network switch with Facebook Wedge software based on Linux, documentation which is also available to the public within the OCP.
Facebook launched a project to develop effective and economical structures servers, storage systems and other equipment for data centers in October 2011. It was built on the model of projects for development of software with open source. According to the vice-president Jay Parikh Facebook, implementation created within OCP technology has given us the opportunity to save for the past three years, more than $ 2 billion.