Facebook, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and other leading IT users think the open-source movement is ready to shake up the hardware industry the way Linux did in software.
In the past, only the very biggest companies — the likes of Amazon, Google, and, yes, Facebook — could afford to customize servers, storage, and networking systems to their precise needs. Instead, most companies have filled their datacenters with off-the-shelf, mass-produced hardware from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Oracle.