Video: Servers Stacked Like Books on a Shelf

One of the interesting facets of the open hardware movement is the potential to bring different approaches to common problems. We saw several different approaches to server chassis design at last week's Open Compute Summit. An example can be seen in Dell's latest generation of Open Compute hardware. On this video, Dell Solutions Architect Rafael Zamora demonstrates Dell's C8000 Open Compute chassis (originally codenamed Zeus). Either 19 inches or 21 inches wide (Open Rack standard), it holds computational units and power units positioned vertically. The units are slotted in sleds and line up like "books on a shelf." This enables either a single-wide or double-wide configuration and the ability to slide sleds out and "hot swap" drives, thus maintaining systems without powering down the entire server. Dell, which has a long relationship with Facebook, has been collaborating on the Open Compute project and working with Facebook since 2008. This video runs 5 minutes, 30 seconds.

For a comparison of other Open Compute designs, see our coverage of Facebook's three-wide server design, and the rackmount designs from AMD and others.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.