Like the EIA 310-D, Open Rack is 24 inches (61 centimeters) wide, the standard size for a floor tile patch. But the equipment bay itself is 21 inches (53 centimeters) wide -- 2 inches wider than EIA 310-D's -- allowing for three motherboards or five 3.5-inch disk drives side-by-side in one chassis.

The rack supports an entirely new modular server design Facebook wants to pursue, also under Open Compute development. In this design, all of the major components of a server -- such as the CPU, hard drive, network cards and memory -- would be easily accessible on the rack tray.

"Servers in the future will look a lot more like sleds," Frankovsky said. "The value of disaggregating servers is that you can [replace] the technology faster," he said. Instead of replacing the entire server when a component fails, or needs to be upgraded, the technician can just replace that particular component.

The racks are also innovative when it comes to supplying power to the individual servers -- through a cableless system consisting of distributed bus that server components can hook into. "The rack becomes the power enclosure," Frankovsky said.

At OSCON, Frankovsky reiterated some of the core drivers behind Open Compute. "We will be building larger and larger data centers, and they will have unique challenges associated with them," he said. "If we don't vote with our wallets, and demand something better, we may not ever know how far the cost of equipment would have gone down if we didn't work together on something like Open Compute."