If the Facebook design becomes a de-facto industry standard for cloud and Web 2.0 data centers, it could make the deployment and management of systems easier over time, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"The Facebook standard seems to be a data-center centric effort where you are looking to establish a system-design standard that can populate a data center with hundreds of thousands of servers," King said.

OCP started as a collaboration project when Facebook engineers designed hardware for the company's Prineville, Oregon, data center. Facebook ultimately opened up the hardware designs, including motherboards, power supply, server chassis, server rack and battery cabinets. At the time, Facebook said the Prineville data center used 38 percent less energy than Facebook's other data centers, while costing 24 percent less.

A lot of companies such as Google and Amazon also have their servers custom-made instead of buying off-the-shelf servers. The custom-built servers reduce financial overhead and strain on IT staff deploying and managing thousands of servers, King said.

The OCP standards body should also benefit the participating companies, King said. By introducing new server designs based on Open Rack, HP and Dell now have the opportunity to design and meet the server specifications of potentially large customers like Google that would otherwise get their servers third-party contract manufacturers like Quanta.