I would like to see a computer system that is easily grown by adding more nodes to a cluster. Storage and compute resources should not be defined by the amount of resources available to you at the computer you are using but by the resources available across an entire cluster of computers that you have access to. I would also like to see hardware failure become a non issue. Even the best hardware fails. We should have software that can understand and handle failure.

As a systems administrator I am tired of implementing expensive hardware that has all kinds of fault tolerant features that I have never used. I’ve been in IT for about 7 years. I can count the number of times that I’ve used the ultra reliable high availability features of hardware on one hand. Instead of putting in a $10k server that has hot swappable everything I’d like to be able to use a handful of smaller, cheaper, redundant computers that can fail without causing an outage. Companies like Google already know that this is important. This is why they designed their own hardware. I would like to do the same, but make it available to the community so we can all benefit.

As a consultant when I implement something like a SAN for a media client they balk at the cost of providing a fault tolerant clustered filesystem to store their video on. On top of the expensive workstations they need to buy there’s also the redundant storage, fibre channel switches, new cabling for their facility, servers to manage the system and new practices to train their staff on. Right now this is the only way to provide a highly available and reliable system for people in their situation. It is also crazy.

The software part of this is coming forward already. I would like to collaborate with others to create an open hardware standard. I believe that system management philosophy is changing and hardware manufacturers are not making their equipment to fully take advantage of the new way of doing things. We can build more reliable computing systems that are better suited to specific needs than a traditional computer hardware manufacturer. Here are some broad goals for the project:

• Create an open hardware standard that specifies physical dimensions, connector types, and operational characteristics of the hardware
• Specify a philosophy for hardware and software systems and processes to conform to to provide a better computing infrastructure.
• Design the system to be easily localized and environmentally friendly.
• License all aspects of the project to allow for individuals, organizations, or companies to produce computing hardware and software compatible with the standard.

I think the next step is to get a project page and code repository hosted somewhere along with a mailing list. While my focus will probably be geared towards creating the hardware I think that a sister project would be specifying a collection of software that would be compatible with the philosophy of the project.

If you’re interested please send me an email and lets get started on something like this.