Don’t want a footie-field-size data centre? No problem (or is there?)

Looking deeper into Facebook's OCP promises

A lack of expertise

In any case, the “clone it and go” argument glosses over a fundamental challenge for small businesses considering Open Compute: they’d have to build the thing themselves. Depending on the size and expertise of the business, that’s no small thing, and would prove time-consuming even to businesses that understood how to do it.

There’s also the software layer to consider. Will small businesses have the expertise to bake together the open source components that they need, asks Dave Peterson, group manager for Cloudline product management at HP?

“Cloud service provider types have an army of developers. They are scripting experts and hardware gurus. They can go in and modify and customise that open source management environment so that it works really well for their environment,” Peterson said.

This is where integrators may be necessary, admits Open Compute Foundation’s Bell.

“Most of the people who actually come into OCP have some sort of technical prowess, because right now you might have a little engineering capability to be able to do certain things,” Bell said. “We have service providers that can help you think through where you are and what you need to get done.”

So, does Open Compute stand a chance in the small business space? For a niche sliver of small businesses willing to take on the entire burden of building, configuring, installing, and then supporting their own server infrastructure, Open Compute may have something to offer. But for the other 99.9 per cent of SMBs, the big OEMs don’t have much to worry about right now. ®