so is this
what MS is deploying in their IT PACs ? Are they still using IT PACs ? Those were pretty neat.
Microsoft has given away the secrets of its data centers for free by joining Facebook's Open Compute Project. The shock move will be announced at the Open Compute Summit on Tuesday and means that the server designs Microsoft uses to support Bing, Office365, and Windows Azure will be available for cloud-wannabes across the …
"Why go to the bother of patenting a design if you then donate it to the community, we wonder."
If the patent was *granted* late last year, then it will have been submitted three or four years ago, at which point the idea of Open Compute was still a glimmer in Facebook's eye. So there's nothing very odd here.
Well despite any disadvantages, there is one significant advantage to the MS-contributed designs - they fit in a standard 19" rack. So those companies with HP, Dell, IBM servers and blade chassis racked today in HP, Dell, APC and IBM racks can switch out those old servers for a "MS Blade Chassis" without also ripping out the racks themselves.
Yes, obviously there are potentially downsides (2 sleds per 45mm 1U, rather than [IIRC] 3 per 48mm OpenRU in the existing OCP designs) but at least it can be up to the customers which size to choose.
Of course, we won't know if the designs use the same or similar power interconnects, nor how the network and storage interconnects are handled, until the designs are available. But it certainly seems to me (and obviously Microsoft) that there could be value in sticking to existing standards for the rack rather than going the whole hog for the new OpenRack design.