Microsoft Contributes Cloud Server Designs to the Open Compute Project, Pushes Data Center Efficiency Forward

Posted by Openness Team

Today at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, Microsoft’s Bill Laing, Cloud and Enterprise Corporate Vice President, took the stage in front of 3,000 attendees to announce Microsoft’s participation in the community, which is focused on engineering the most efficient hardware for cloud and high-scale computing through open collaboration.

Laing also announced a major OCP community contribution – the Microsoft cloud server specification, which essentially provides the blueprints for Microsoft’s datacenter servers that are designed to deliver the world’s most diverse portfolio of cloud services, including Windows Azure, Office 365, and Bing.

The potential benefits of this specification over traditional enterprise server designs are staggering -- up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times. Laing expects “this server design to contribute to our environmental sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by 10,000 tons across our base of 1 million servers.”

Microsoft is the only cloud service provider of its kind to release server designs through OCP. As part of this effort, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is open sourcing the software code created for the management of hardware operations, such as server diagnostics, power supply and fan control.

Learn more about the OCP’s mission and the Microsoft cloud server specification on the Official Microsoft Blog or at www.opencompute.org.