Dive Brief:
- Facebook is leading a new vendor collaboration project to build low-cost computing hardware and collaborate on designs of data center products.
- Called the Open Compute Project, the non-profit effort could eventually challenge traditional server, network and storage gear providers like Cisco and Juniper.
- Several telecom companies, including Verizon, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom and Equinix recently joined the group, and will add designs for communication switches to the project.
Dive Insight:
Similar to open source software, the open source hardware movement encourages crowdsourcing and collaboration, opening the door for faster advancements.
As enterprises move workloads into public clouds, there is less need for telecos to connect them. To remain competitive, telecom providers need to adopt network technologies such as software-defined networking and network functions virtualization.
“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.
Experts predict open source tools will soon be a much higher percentage of every IT organization’s environment.
