British data center company sues Facebook for swiping modular designs

Facebook is regularly in the news for promoting new innovations in data center efficiency and design. The latest headlines concerning the tech giant are, however, less than positive. British developers BladeRoom Group (BRG) are suing Facebook for a breach of good faith, damages incurred when Facebook allegedly published BRG's trade secrets, business practices that hurt competition and compensation for BRG's legal fees, said Data Center Knowledge. Though a few extra nuggets of information have emerged, most of the key details have been redacted from the public version of the lawsuit.

Facebook is being sued for sharing trade secrets.

The next few months may be rocky ones for Facebook's public profile. Ironically, the legal drama will undoubtedly draw greater media attention to the technology both companies are attempting to promote. There couldn't be a clearer sign that modular data centers are headed for the mainstream than the sight of giant tech companies duking it out to stake their claim in the technology's future.

BladeRoom Group claims Facebook published trade secrets
In addition to suing Facebook for inappropriate use of its trade secrets, the BladeRoom Group is asserting that the social media company caused further harm by publishing trade secrets lifted from the BladeRoom Group via Facebook's Open Compute Project. The company was adamant about singling out the initiative in its lawsuit, according to Computerworld.

"Facebook's misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG's intellectual property was enough," said BRG via its lawsuit filed in the San Jose, California, federal district court. "Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG's intellectual property through an initiative created by Facebook called the 'Open Compute Project'."

Modular marches on regardless of who leads the charge
Regardless of who takes credit for championing modular data centers, the industry is certainly catching on. According to data collected by Marketsandmarkets, the modular data center market is expected to see interest from data center customers across multiple sectors. The need for compact, prefabricated data center hardware is expected to drive global revenues for the modular data centers up to $26 billion annually by 2019.

A big part of the appeal of modular data centers is their versatility. Companies in need of a quickly deployable solution will be able to populate new data centers with high-end hardware. Plus, the use of technology like remote console servers will make it simple for legacy facilities to expand without a huge impact on their productivity.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.