"What has been missing here has been standardization at the systems level," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, an OCP board member who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later was the first major investor in Google. He railed against "gratuitous differentiation" on the part of server vendors, who each have their own unique chassis or some other component that prevents users from intermingling the equipment with gear from other vendors.

On Thursday, at an event in New York, Facebook it has set up the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a stand-alone standards foundation. Executives from a number of IT companies, including Intel, Dell, Rackspace and Red Hat, have joined the governing board. The company the Open Compute Project in April, in order to share the best practices in data center efficiency.

OCP has been modeled after the Apache Software Foundation, in that it would sponsor and manage projects developed by third parties, said Frank Frankovsky, a Facebook engineer who founded the project. Unlike the ASF, however, it would focus on open-source hardware projects instead of software. "Today, open-source isn't just something you use to describe software, but it's a way to describe hardware, as well," said Frankovsky.

The effort would focus on developing a set of specifications that vendors could use to build interoperable equipment, something data center managers today sorely need, according to the foundation's managers. If enough organizations demand equipment that meets these specs, the founders reason, the vendors will build the products to meet the specs.

Because of its quick growth, Facebook ended up building its own servers because it was the most economic option, once factors such as data center cooling and electricity usage were factored in.