I work for a server manufacturer. We integrate other people's hardware (SuperMicro and Intel EPSD mostly) and sell it to customers. We sell everything from simple individual systems to highly-integrated multi-rack clusters to an incredibly diverse set of customers.<p>We were one of the initial Open Compute hardware partners thanks to some historical networking connections. We had almost zero interest in Open Compute from our customers. Maybe a dozen quotes total over six months, and we've never shipped a single Open Compute system despite all the initial hype, and despite the designs suiting a lot of our repeat customers. Nobody that would otherwise buy a commodity server wants these Open Compute designs, at least from us. We ended our Open Compute effort a few months ago.<p>Is <i>anyone</i> outside of the original designers actually using Open Compute hardware in a production environment?
Straight out of Joel Sposky's "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements" strategy: <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html</a>
I think this is FB, Microsoft et al creating a pool of vendors that can supply them with hardware that follows the design they need.<p>The fact that other company can use the designs is just a side effect, unlikely to impact their operations (as is, enabling competitors).
Bankrolled purchasers are attempting to commodity the server landscape into a platform that choke smaller companies.<p>Something about embrace, extend and extinguish... <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish</a><p>SSDD
This counts as a wanton act of hostility toward every server vendor in the x86 space.<p>Is this payback for all of the PC players adopting Chromebook and Android, or is this the tipping point where MS has decided not to care about selling Windows Server and instead cares only about driving down its own costs to deploy Azure and O365?