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Now, how can I actually use these? I say it every time I see "company X releases Y" or open compute project... They are lovely and I want to use it, but, any

by wilhil 10y ago

Now, how can I actually use these? I say it every time I see "company X releases Y" or open compute project... They are lovely and I want to use it, but, any enquiry to the manufacturers show that you need a minimum order that is too big for small scale companies and I don't see many of the larger companies actually using each other's designs. So, it is all well and good being open, but, I seriously wonder who benefits from it?

discodave 10y ago
The main beneficiary is Facebook and other hyper-scale operators for whom datacenter operating costs is not a competitive advantage. Google and Microsoft are arguably in it to look "open" and/or they are trying to reduce their hardware R&D costs (like how they use Linux). AWS are staying out because they consider their hardware proprietary and a competitive advantage. I don't think Google has made their latest and greatest stuff open (particularly network infra). If you don't have the scale to order your own hardware then you should probably be considering one of the cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).