English company blames Facebook for using its proprietary data center project for the Open Compute Project

An interesting lawsuit was filed recently by the English company BladeRoom Group to Facebook. The plaintiff accuses the social network of using the BladeRoom Group data center project for the Open Compute Project . In particular, BladeRoom Group accuses Facebook of using its technology and intellectual property to build a data center in Luleå, Sweden.

It should be noted that the project Open Compute Project is something like Open Source, but not in the world of software, but in the world of data centers. The company gives any project documentation for its data centers to partners, and Facebook also shows the history of the creation of various structural elements of the project. The goal of the Open Compute Project is to open the possibility of quickly building unified data centers for any company anywhere in the world.

The project started in 2011 with the filing of Facebook's new technical director, Frank Frankovsky. Since then, the project has been constantly updated and improved. Last year, Facebook began building a second data center in Luleå , Sweden. This data center is fully consistent with the standards of the Open Compute Project, in particular, the RDDC (rapid deployment data center).
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The company lays out all the structural elements of the data center, the technologies that are used in construction. Drawings, schemes, plans - all this becomes public property and can be used by any company.







The key points of the current project are three factors:
Construction of a data center from ready-made interchangeable modules. Whenever possible, developers try to standardize the components of the overall structure, to unify them.

Reducing the impact of the object on the environment. For the construction of the data center, ready-made modules are used; on the construction site, it remains only to assemble everything into a single whole. Due to this, the presence of builders and their influence on the terrain is minimal.

More efficient team work. Actually, the following follows from the two previous points. Namely - the work of the builders team is as efficient as possible, saving man-hours is obvious.


Render data center Lulea-2

All would be fine, but BladeRoom claims that Facebook uses its technology. Until 2011, the company did not want to quarrel with Facebook. But now, when the social network began to show BladeRoom technology in detail to everyone, the British company decided to sue Facebook.

It is worth noting that BladeRoom is not some kind of patent troll. This company appeared 20 years ago, starting to build modular buildings for commercial canteens. Later, modular operating and technical complexes for various industries appeared in the company's assets. In 2008, the company changed its profile, and began to build only modular data centers. In 2013, BladeRoom entered into a partnership agreement with Modular Power Solutions, agreeing to form its subsidiary, which now manufactures modules in Michigan, USA.