Since the dawn of the computing age, data center servers have been 19 inches in width, fitting into racks that have an outer dimension of 24 inches. The Open Compute Project today announced a new Open Rack standard that will change the interior server width to 21 inches in a bid to improve server density for hyperscale computing data centers.
“With Open Rack, think of it as trying to bring the promise of blade servers, but doing it at the rack level and doing it in open source,” Frankovsky said. “I consider it to be ‘blades done right.'”