Large Telcos Flock to Facebook's Open Compute Project, Open Hardware

As Facebook has grown so quickly over the past several years, it has also had to deal with issues pertaining to massively scalable computing architectures. Frequently, we've covered the news of the company's Open Compute Project, an attempt to get tech industry titans to share strategies and designs for massively scalable computing architectures. It's effectively an open source project designed around community contributions of very advanced data center-centric technologies.

Now, in a blog post, Facebook leaders have announced that telecommunications industry leader are embracing the Open Compute Project (OCP) in a big way.

According to Facebook:

"We are optimistic about the potential of open hardware to bring large-scale gains to the telecommunications industry, and that starts with increased participation. Today, a number of leading telecommunications companies announced they are joining OCP to support the goal of openly working to drive more efficiency, flexibility, and customization in data center technologies. Specifically, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, EE, SK Telecom, and Verizon are joining OCP and demonstrating the demand for more innovation, vendor choice, and customization in their infrastructure designs.

Industry expertise is an important part of establishing new opportunities and paths for collaboration around open hardware. For example, Nokia has announced that they will incorporate OCP designs into its AirFrame Data Center Portfolio. We are also excited that Equinix and Nexius have joined OCP, making it easier for telecommunications companies to find efficiency and flexibility benefits through open hardware."

Jason Taylor, President and Chairman of the OCP Board and VP of Infrastructure at Facebook, added: “OCP community momentum is strong, and we get closer to our vision of better and more open hardware development each time a new industry embraces the principles of openness and customization. Leaders in telecommunications embracing OCP signifies the start of a new and exciting chapter as we work together to enable better designs, easier adoption, and efficiency gains across the board.”

 "AT&T will virtualize 75% of its network functions by 2020, and to do that, we need to move to a model of sophisticated software running on commodity hardware,” said Andre Fuetsch, Senior Vice President of Architecture and Design at AT&T. “We’re becoming a software and networking company. As a result, our central offices are going to look a lot more like data centers as we evolve our networking infrastructure. The Open Compute Project is innovating rapidly in this area, and we’re thrilled to be collaborating with the community of engineers and developers that are driving the evolution. We look forward to our vendors and other industry players supporting this initiative, as well.”

“With the Cloudification of our network functions and the related change in our production models, the Telco industry is going through a massive transformation. Efficiency in our datacenters becomes critical for success - we fully support the open industry approach within OCP,” said Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO, Deutsche Telekom AG.

According to Facebook's published guidelines, the new OCP Telco Project will advance the following objectives: 1) communicating telco technical requirements effectively to the OCP community; 2) strengthening the OCP ecosystem to address the deployment and operational needs of telcos; and 3) bringing OCP innovations to telco data center infrastructure for increased cost-savings and agility.