Microsoft introduced a next generation server design for hyperscale cloud hardware, named Project Olympus.
The announcement details will be discussed at the Zettastructure conference in London 1st and 2nd November, by Kushagra Vaid, GM, Azure Hardware Infrastructure.
The company’s collaboration with OCP Foundation and the open source community over past years has given Microsoft insight that open source hardware development is not currently as agile as its software.
In order to make relevant changes, Microsoft and OCP collaborate once again to introduce a new hardware development model for community based open collaboration, he said in a blog.
Microsoft’s new server design is expected to influence the rest of the data centre industry.
The new design is to be submitted to the open source Open Commute Project, giving others the opportunity to work on and make us of it.
In the blog post, Kushagra Vaid, GM, Azure Hardware Infrastructure said: “Project Olympus applies a model of open source collaboration that has been embraced for software but has historically been at odds with the physical demands of developing hardware. We’re taking a very different approach by contributing our next generation cloud hardware designs when they are approx.”
The project will allow the community to contribute to the ecosystem, through downloading, modifying, and also looking at the hardware design just like open source software.
Vaid says the community can play a significant role in expanding the Project Olympus ecosystem by taking advantage of the early access and contributing additional advantage of the early access, also contributing additional building blocks to enable a new common hardware design will to its benefits.
These building blocks include a new universal motherboard, high-availability power supply with include batteries, 1U/2U server chassis, high-density expansion, a new universal rack power distribution unit (PDU) for global data centre interoperability and a standards compliant rack management card.
Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer, Open Compute Project Foundation said: “Microsoft is opening the door to a new era of open source hardware development. Project Olympus, the re-imagined collaboration model and the way they’re bringing it to market, is unprecedented in the history of OCP and open source data centre hardware.”
