can be seen as a test case for this approach. Facebook plans to test the prototypes over the next few months, and, if they work as planned, the company will start using them in its data centers by early next year, Frankovsky said. "From 2013 forward, every rack we deploy in our data centers will be Open Rack," he said. Thanks to how the rack design is freely available under an open-source license, any manufacturer can produce these racks for Facebook or other customers.

At first glance, an Open Rack chassis may appear much like any other rack, though these prototypes carry a lot of .

Today, the most widely used racks in data centers are based on the specification, which wasn't developed for holding computer equipment at all, Frankovsky pointed out. It actually was created during the 1950s to hold railroad signal relays.

"They were never designed to go into data centers," Frankovsky said. Using EIA 310-D, "You have devices that are poking out the front, or poking out the back. You have cable routes that make IT nonserviceable."

Among other issues, EIA 310-D only specifies the length of the inner rails in a rack. Other dimensions, such as height, depth and mounting points, are left to manufacturers. As a result, each manufacturer creates a slightly different rack, and each vendor's rack is incompatible with those from competing vendors.