The Facebook Open Compute story is a pretty clear effort to position itself as a leader in open data center design. But it also provides a way for it to show enterprise operators the way it manages data volumes that rival any data center operation in the world.

Yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum, Facebook and Intel announced that the OpenCompute project would work with the Open Data Center Alliance, the network of enterprise customers and service providers that are developing standards for the way data centers are built and operated.

The move is interesting for a few reasons.

Enterprise data center operators struggle with the ways of the Web oriented world. Facebook’s data center is designed for the very purpose of serving its 600 million+ customers with photos, news feeds, video uploads and the like. Facebook can teach something to the enterprise customer about developing an infrastructure for Web oriented environments. As one ODCA member said to me yesterday: “You get a large scale Web 2.0 company hitting legacy problems.”

Enterprise customers pay too much money for high end servers. Facebook advocates a commoditized stack with application differentiation on top.

Facebook gets leverage. Facebook aligns can get on the same level  as the largest enterprises in the world. That gives them a place at the table, potentially on par with Google, their arch rival in the Web world.

Services Angle

This is a big win for ODCA members.The people at Facebook now become peers with ODCA members. That means a level of respect and a comfortable environment to interact and learn about how to manage significant data loads.

It’s also a sign of what service providers have to do in order to compete. It means providing a commodity infrastructure so the real differentiation is at the top of the stack, where developers can easily build apps.

The hope here is that perhaps the silos will break down. The new world of app development is one with far faster development cycles. There has to be better integrations between developers and operations. This new alliance means there will be work toward a more unified data center environment.

In the end, these companies are all working toward federation as illustrated in the technical efforts in discussion here at IDF. For example, EMC is showcasing a proof of concept that is designed to provide a framework for secure federation. The demonstration highlights cloud on-boarding and data availability with the goal being to securely move virtual machines. That is the kind of effort that dovetails with what Facebook now brings to the table.