Cole Crawford may no longer be director of the Open Compute Project (OCP), but he’s still over the moon for Open Compute. As founder and CEO of Vapor IO, Crawford explained his decision to leave the OCP by saying that “every now and again you need to stop begin a preacher and be a shepherd.” While Crawford has high hopes for Vapor IO, he quoted Isaac Newton when speaking of his accomplishments, saying “If I see farther, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.” Crawford called out one giant in particular: Open Compute.

Open Compute makes it easier to see “where money is being invested, where ecosystems are gaining traction,” said Crawford. Thanks to his experience in the OCP, Crawford remarked,”we were in a unique position.” When working for a non-profit, he explained, “sometimes people tell you things, little bits of insight.” And this insight led to revelations on the nature of Open Compute projects, with Crawford explaining that “over the past 9 months I’ve been thinking about what I could do for Open Compute.”

How Vapor Helps Alleviate Industry Pain Points

Crawford explained that Vapor IO operates on several fronts. It helps companies achieve insight into how their energy expenditure correlates with their workload performance. The goal, said Crawford, is to get an even more accurate way to measure performance than power usage effectiveness or PUE, the gold standard for determining how much energy data centers use at any given time, which Crawford said “doesn’t tell you anything,” except “how the electricity got from the grid to the rack, it tells you nothing about the workloads.” Crawford continued, citing that as a community, “we should expose an API that gives you the ability to plugin performance as a variable,” That way a workload could be considered “in context of how energy is being delivered to the rank and how well your workload is performing,” said Crawford. As a result, companies can get to a more realistic metric, like “performance per watt per dollar,” Crawford explained.

In addition, Vapor IO’s products are encourage companies to “treat infrastructure more like cattle and less like pets,” Crawford explained. That is to say, they spend less on space and maintenance for their data centers. Their work in this vein includes “small footprint type data centers,” said Crawford. These hexagonal data centers are 150 kilowatts and 9 foot square. A company can “build [their] own cloud in a facility [they’ve] already built,” — Furthermore, Crawford called out that Vapor IO data centers also help lower power and cooling expenditures.

Smaller, more efficient data centers are of particular importance because the large infrastructure costs to much to house and maintain. It boils down to “pure economics,” explained Crawford: It takes 5-10 million dollars per megawatt to build out a data center at the moment, Crawford noted, and therefore C-level execs aren’t willing to experiment. Now, Crawford said, “we can deliver that experience, at half the cost. Now, all of a sudden, when you want to start thinking about building a data center, that process isn’t so scary.”

Leveraging Licensing

In fact, Crawford said that Vapor IO has just “launched a strategic relationship with Jabil Circuit, Inc. and their division Sack Velocity has, initially, an exclusive license both to manufacture and deliver.” One of the benefits that open source has offered Vapor IO, said Crawford, is the ability to “look like a hardware company” without incurring any of the costs associated with that type of start up. “It’s all about licensing,” while “Jabil takes care of the CAPX [capital expenditure],” Crawford explained.

Goals for the Data Center

Crawford is looking to the future when it comes to the data center. He stresses that “nobody really wants a parking lot data center.” that said, he acknowledged, “people want to reclaim and reuse that infrastructure, but we need to offer practical solutions to the problem.” Crawford believes his “data center in a box” is one such practical fix. It’s much easier, he continued, “to ship a pallet, build the thing, and start processing data.”

The realistic future of the datacenter, Crawford predicted, is one that requires “less power, less space,” and is “more distributed,” according to Crawford. Much as Facebook has developed a disaggregated rack, Crawford believes “we need disaggregated data centers.” Above all, he stressed that “we need to start talking to racks and data centers as a holistic thing.” A consistent standard, he added, would also help level the playing field. When the industry is doing the right thing, “the consumer wins, and the customer wins, and the community wins,” Crawford concluded.

Watch the full interview with Crawford below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Compute Summit 2015.