Calxeda, a Silicon Valley designer of processors and System-on-Chip (SoC) cards for servers based on the low-power ARM architecture, has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) and contributed an ARM-based server-motherboard design to the open-source-hardware community.

The server motherboard design, codenamed “Project Knockout”, is a contribution to OCP’s Open Vault, a storage solution developed for the Open Rack, an OCP-designed data center equipment rack. It is a modular and highly dense storage chassis, packing up to 30 drives in a 2U box, which “can operate with almost any host server,” according to a description on the OCP website.

Calxeda is demonstrating solutions it has been developing for the Open Compute Project at this week’s Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California. Visit the DatacenterDynamics FOCUS website for more news from the summit throughout this week.

Intel also has a motherboard designed to make Open Vault a storage server. Frank Frankovsky, director hardware design and supply chain at Facebook and one of OCP’s leaders, showed both boards in his keynote at the summit Wednesday.

Gina Longoria, product marketing manager at Calxeda, said the server specification would change the existing Open Vault spec, which was released to the public through OCP last year. “That was basically a storage chassis that was developed starting from Facebook’s requirements,” she said.

While the existing Open Vault storage chassis all plug into a single server within the rack, a dedicated Calxeda server node is meant to be installed onto each chassis. Instead of having an expander in the chassis to connect it to compute capacity, “we actually put a node of compute in each chassis,” Longoria said.

This does two things: allows for better performance of storage-compute functions like deduplication and compression and reduces the possibility of a failure.

If a compute node in the current Open Vault system fails, all storage attached to it fails too. With Calxeda’s spec, if one of the compute nodes fails, a node in a different rack can pick up its workload, Longoria explained.

Calxeda does not have a product based on the design yet. It is still developing the spec, and now that it is open to the public, the company’s engineers are awaiting feedback from the industry.

Calxeda was one of the first companies to start marketing ARM chips for servers. The architecture’s UK-based designer ARM Holdings originally created it for mobile devices – a market ARM currently dominates.

Calxeda has yet to release a 64-bit ARM SoC (expected in 2014). Once it does, it is likely to have an easier time in that space than it has with its 32-bit SoCs.

Applied Micro, a major competitor of Caxeda's in the ARMs race, announced a 64-bit ARM server board at the OCP summit Wednesday.

For now, however, storage is the company’s shortest route into the data center market, Karl Freund, Calxeda’s VP of marketing, told GigaOm in December. It does not matter to storage companies whether the chips are 32 bit or 64 bit, he said.

The company’s main competitors in the server space include Applied Micro and AMD.

One table a chip company better be sitting at
OCP is an organization Facebook started in 2011 to create an open-source design community for IT equipment and data center infrastructure components that works similarly to the open-source software-development community.

Joining OCP was a no-brainer for Calxeda, Longoria said. The company is tackling the hyper-scale data center space, which is what much of OCP has been about.

In her view, OCP is bound to become a standardization force for hyper-scale data centers, and it is important for Calxeda to be at the table as that process unfolds.

Whether Facebook is a Calxeda customer, Longoria could not say. “We are definitely in talks with Facebook on a regular basis,” she said. “We worked quite closely with them to understand their requirements,” which includes the Project Knockout motherboard spec.