The Open Compute Project (OCP) initiative was announced in April 2011 by Facebook to openly share designs of data center products. The project started by three engineers resulted in building own custom-designed servers, power supplies, server racks and battery backup systems.

The team designed its first data center in Prineville, Oregon. The result of the effort is that Prineville data center now uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook’s existing facilities, while costing 24 percent less.

The Open Compute Project Foundation is a community of engineers around the world, whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage, networking and data center hardware designs for scalable computing. Foundation believe that openly sharing ideas, specifications and other intellectual property is the key to maximizing innovation, accelerating market change and reducing operational complexity in the scale compute space.

With more than 150 official members, including new partners like Bloomberg, IBM, IO, LSI, Microsoft, Yandex and others the future belongs to Open Compute.