Two years ago, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project to open-source the design of energy-efficient data center hardware. Facebook’s Prineville, Ore. data center (pictured) is an early showcase for Open Compute hardware. Intel, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs also back the effort.

The GSA’s Schedule 70 puts IT providers on an “approved list,” which makes it easier for them to win government contracts. The fact that Hyve, a division of Synnex, got the nod, means it will be easier for government agencies to use Facebook’s data center designs, according to Data Center Knowledge.

Another week, another set of outages

It doesn’t help the case for broader cloud adoption when popular services go offline. And last week there were two major snafus — Microsoft’sHotmail and Outlook.com services both went down for a (vocal) subset of users starting Monday with issues continuing into Wednesday. On Thursday, Dropbox went down. The popular file-share-and-sync service — it claims 100 million users – was restored Friday. There was no post mortem in either case detailing what went wrong.

Dell, Intel back Mirantis’ OpenStack play

Mirantis, a systems integrator that has been pushing its vision of vendor-agnostic OpenStack clouds, got $10 million in funding from two vendors — Dell and Intel, as well as WestSummit Capital to fund its efforts.

The company said it builds the best OpenStack cloud per customer requirements based on its knowledge of which OpenStack components are most advanced and stable. Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said the fact that it’s taking money from Dell will not neutralize its vendor-independent position.

A cadre of high-tech vendors including Dell, HP, Cisco, IBM, Red Hat are all aboard the OpenStack train. Mirantis already was working with both Dell and Cisco on their respective OpenStack implementations, he said. WestSummit, a venture capital firm based in Beijing, will help Mirantis crack the insular Asian market, Ionel said.

 Photo courtesy of Flickr user IntelFreePress

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Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, insisted that involvement by Dell and Intel does not neuter the company’s vendor-agnostic pitch and that the investments comes after collaboration with both companies.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company already worked with Intel and Dell on OpenStack projects including Dell’s Crowbar cloud installer, as well as with Cisco on its OpenStack-based Webex implementation and sees no reason that it can’t work with other OpenStack backers going forward. Hewlett Packard, Red Hat, Nebula and other companies are all creating their own take on OpenStack clouds. Update: (Last week, a Dell exec  acknowledged to ITworld that the company was delaying its public OpenStack cloud till late this year.)

WestSummit, based in China, is also an important strategic backer.  ”China and the Asia-Pacific region is huge on OpenStack  – and WestSummit can help us enter that market which, given the cultural peculiarities, is hard to penetrate without local connections,” Ionel said.

While Intel and WestSummit will get board seats, Dell will not. “We have a strategic relationship with them but nevertheless we remain vendor independent so we can work with the broadest ecosystem of partners,” Ionel said.

This is not a typical Series A round, he added. “We’ve had a good run doing things ourselves, we have 300 employees and 30 projects, but OpenStack has gotten too big for us to keep making meaningful progress without financing and strong strategic partnerships,” said Boris Rensky, Mirantis’ executive VP and co founder.

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