Microsoft presents a new cloud server design to Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP)-- Project Olympus, a hardware design taking an open source approach usually adopted by software.
"The current process for open hardware development is to contribute designs that are production-ready," the company says. "At that stage, the design is essentially finalised-- almost 100% complete-- and this late contribution delays the development of derivative designs, limits interactive community engagement and adoption, and slows down overall delivery."
The Project Olympus design currently stands at 50% completion, and consists of a new server chassis, new universal motherboard, battery-backed power supply, rack management card and rack power distribution unit. It has space for up ti 8 NVMe SSDs (M.2), up to 3 full-height, half-length PCIe cards, high-speed DDR4 RAM and optional heat sinks for high-wattage processors.
The specifications of the mechanical and electronic server chassis interfaces, motherboard and pwer distribution unit are already available on GitHub, and the entire rack will be fully open source in the near future.
Microsoft hopes the design will "become the foundation for a broad ecosystem of compliant hardware products developed by the OCP community." It joins similar offerings by other OCP members, including Google and Rackspace.