Microsoft, in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (OCP), announced Project Olympus – a next generation hyperscale cloud hardware design and a new model for open source hardware development with the OCP community.
With Project Olympus, Microsoft said it hopes to foster a model of open source collaboration that has been embraced for software but has historically been at odds with the physical demands of developing hardware. Rather than contributing a fully-completed design to OCP, with this new approach, Microsoft will contribute its next generation cloud hardware designs when they are approximately 50% complete. This is intended to encourage community involvement in the iterative design process.
“Microsoft is opening the door to a new era of open source hardware development. Project Olympus, the re-imagined collaboration model and the way they’re bringing it to market, is unprecedented in the history of OCP and open source datacenter hardware,” said Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer, Open Compute Project Foundation.
The building blocks that Project Olympus will contribute consist of a new universal motherboard, high-availability power supply with included batteries, 1U/2U server chassis, high-density storage expansion, a new universal rack power distribution unit (PDU) for global datacenter interoperability, and a standards compliant rack management card.
Microsoft noted that over 90% of the servers it currently purchases are based on OCP contributed specifications.
