Many infrastructure teams have a version of this story: a storage system runs for years without complaint. Then a part fails after the vendor has stopped making it. Support has expired, replacements are gone, and the specifications are locked away as vendor property. Everything else in the system still works. The whole machine is retired anyway, over a single part that no one outside the original vendor is permitted to build.
Open hardware exists to remove that failure. And it is why remanufactured Open Compute Project storage is a fundamentally different category from ordinary used equipment.
An OCP Storage Primer
The Open Compute Project began in 2011, when Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, and Andy Bechtolsheim founded a nonprofit to share data center hardware designs the way open-source communities share code. Members design equipment for their own facilities and publish the complete specifications, so anyone can build, buy, or repair them.
Storage is one of the clearest cases. Meta designed Bryce Canyon for its own data centers, published the design on March 8, 2017, and contributed it to OCP. Each system holds 72 drive bays and connects them over SAS, the same standard interface used across enterprise storage, so the platform takes commodity drives from any manufacturer. The management firmware is open as well.
Meta contributed a successor, Grand Canyon, in 2022. It kept the same 72-bay form factor and added faster networking, updated compute, and more vibration control. Hardware that ran inside some of the largest data centers in the world now comes with its blueprints attached, and those blueprints do not expire when a product line does.
What Openness Changes
The advantage appears once the first owner is done with the hardware. The full documentation for an OCP platform is public, and any competent engineer can work from it. Firmware can be updated years after the original deployment, and a part that has gone out of production can be fabricated from the published specifications. RackRenew engineers have done both for OCP hardware in service today.
Closed hardware allows none of this. The specifications stay with the original vendor, so the hardware’s useful life ends when the vendor’s support ends. With open hardware, the documentation outlasts any one company’s product cycle. That is the property that makes a safe second life possible.
From Open Hardware to Remanufactured Hardware
Public specifications alone do not make pre-owned equipment worth buying. The process does. In remanufacturing, technicians disassemble the hardware, test every component, replace worn parts, and revalidate the system against its original specification. Drives are provisioned separately, as new units or graded refurbished units, and the supplier’s warranty passes through to the buyer either way.
The result is commercial coverage as well as engineering confidence: a one-year warranty, and an RMA process in which the replacement ships before the failed unit comes back. Support contracts renew beyond the warranty. As an example, one installation we support is now in its eighth year of operation.
Where It Fits
Remanufactured OCP storage is a capacity and a throughput platform. The strongest fits are data lakes, backup and archive, HPC scratch tiers, and virtual machine hosting, the workloads where cost per petabyte governs the decision. What that cost per petabyte looks like for research and higher education is set out in the whitepaper Petabyte Economics for Research & Education. It is not built for latency-critical flash tiers, and sites testing next-generation interconnects need current silicon this hardware does not carry. Buyers should also plan for integration engineering: open hardware is flexible, and the work a bundled appliance folds into its price is work an OCP buyer takes on deliberately. A first deployment starts at a single rack, and the rack does not need to arrive full.
Why RackRenew?
Remanufacturing at this level requires a steady source of hardware and a controlled process. Both are the reason RackRenew exists. We are a brand of Sims Lifecycle Services, part of a company that traces its origins to 1917, and our parent company repurposed 18 million units of IT equipment in fiscal year 2026. Our decommissioning stream comes from contracted, multi-year agreements with hyperscale operators, with forecasting data on what arrives and when. Remanufacturing runs at our circular centers in Nashville area (La Vergne, TN) and in Eindhoven area (Son en Breugel, NB) in the Netherlands. We have been an OCP Recognized Solution Provider since 2024, and our products are listed on the OCP Marketplace.
The Question to Ask
Caution about used hardware is reasonable. The precise question is whether the equipment’s documentation will outlive its vendor’s interest in it. For a closed chassis, the answer is no. For OCP hardware, remanufactured under warranty and supplied through a contracted decommissioning stream, the answer is yes, and that is the case for Bryce Canyon.
Download the whitepaper Petabyte Economics for Research & Education, see the remanufactured OCP storage platforms, or talk to us about your capacity requirements.
