Open Compute Project

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Open Compute Project (OCP)

The Open Compute Project is a global group that shares open designs for data center hardware and the best ways to run them. It started as Facebook’s internal project in 2009, called Project Freedom, and was opened to the public in 2011. The goal is to make data centers cheaper, faster to build, and more energy efficient.

OCP is a Delaware-based nonprofit (501(c)(6)) with a board, an advisory board, and a steering committee. As of 2020, the board had seven members—one individual and six from member organizations. Mark Roenigk of Facebook serves as president and chairman, with Andy Bechtolsheim as the individual member. Other board members come from big tech and hardware companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Rackspace. A current member list is on opencompute.org.

Membership has grown a lot. By February 2025, more than 400 companies worldwide were members, including Arm, Meta, IBM, Wiwynn, Intel, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, Seagate, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Lenovo, Accton, Alibaba, and more.

What OCP does
- It develops and shares open hardware designs for servers, storage, power, and networking.
- It promotes energy-efficient, modular, and cost-effective data centers.
- It runs many projects and continually updates specifications as technology evolves, including AI workloads.

Key projects and concepts
- Open Rack: a standardized, wider rack system to fit more equipment and improve airflow. The latest Open Rack V3 base spec was published in 2022 by Meta, with contributions from Google and Rittal, along with power and monitoring specs.
- High Power Rack (HPR): aims to push rack power up to about 92 kW, with collaboration from Meta, Rittal, Delta Electronics, and Advanced Energy.
- Open Vault (Knox): storage blocks with high disk density in a compact form, including a cold-storage option.
- NVMe JBOF Lightning: introduced in 2016 by Facebook and Wiwynn, based on the Open Vault concept.

Networking and switches
- Facebook helped develop open networking switches (Wedge and Wedge-100) using Broadcom chips and the FBOSS Linux OS. Other contributors include Accton/Edgecore, Mellanox, Interface Masters, and Agema.
- These switches can run open networking OSes such as Cumulus Linux, Switch Light OS, or PICOS.
- OCP NIC 3.0 (released in 2019) defines three form factors for network interface cards (SFF, TSFF, LFF).

Power and efficiency
- OCP supports energy-efficient power designs, including three-phase 277/480 VAC and a single 12.5 VDC power supply for that input, plus 48 VDC backup power. There are also specifications for 230/400 VAC in European and other regions.

Legal note
- In 2015, BladeRoom Group and Bripco sued Facebook over trade secrets related to prefabricated data centers. Facebook asked for the case to be dismissed, and it was settled confidentially in 2018.