Frank  ‎Frankovsky, the Vice President of Hardware Design and Supply Chain Operations at Facebook, will be leaving the social networking giant to “work on a new open-source hardware business focused on developing and delivering optical technology for capacity-optimized storage needs.”

Frankovsky announced his departure via his Facebook Page today.  He was one of the few hardware hires in Facebook, and though he felt like a fish out of water, he stated that he had an incredible work experience at the company.

“The work we have done together to custom design the most efficient data centers and server/storage systems with a small but mighty team was an awesome experience that I will always have fond memories of,” Frankovsky wrote.

Frankovsky also serves as the Chairman and President of the Open Compute Project Foundation, a project that started with just three engineers at Facebook with the single goal of creating a solution on how to scale computing infrastructure in the most economical and efficient way possible.  Now the OCP has greatly impacted the industry, setting new standards and fostering what our Editor in Chief John Furrier calls the new “home brew” culture that’s rethinking IT infrastructure.

Though he will be leaving Facebook, Frankovsky will continue his work with the OCP and serve as its Chairman and President.

Sticking with OCP

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In his post, he also announced that the OCP’s board has recently expanded with the addition of  Jason Taylor from Facebook and Bill Laing from Microsoft.  Frankovsky stated that Taylor played a key role in shaping Facebook’s infrastructure over the years and he is excited to have him at OCP, as well as Laing who will be representing Microsoft, a company that has already made significant contributions to OCP.

Last January, the fifth edition of the OCP Summit was conducted in San Jose, California. theCUBE was there for the entire event, broadcasting live interviews with top industry leaders and executives. Frankovsky kicked off the first day of the event with his opening keynote “Open Compute Project: 2014 and Beyond.”

He relished how OCP got started with a simple idea of applying open source principles to the hardware space.  Back in 2007, there were only a handful of people working on OCP, and now there are more than 350 people registered, more than 150 members across suppliers and customers, and proudly announced that international expansion is going well.

For 2014, Frankovsky predicts that it will be the year “when you will see new methods and new hardware for cold storage, more about disaggregated rack, more about alternative processor architectures and flexibility and choice in networking.”

“The future of the industry is wide open for us to invent. It’s no longer an industry that’s one-sided. It is customers and suppliers working together to invent what happens next, and that’s what excites me about open compute,” Frankovsky said in conclusion.