Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s poster child for the Open Compute Project (OCP) and its VP of hardware design and operations, has left Facebook to start a new open-source hardware business.

His start up will be delivering optical technology for capacity-optimized storage needs, he said in a Facebook post.

His work will build on the innovation created through OCP, the foundation he currently acts as president and chairman for.

“Delivering innovative and efficient infrastructure to the world is a life long journey that has just begun,” Frankovsky, who features on this month’s cover of FOCUS – issue 34, said.

“I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

Frankovsky began his career at Facebook more than four years ago. In his time at the company he has helped create some of the most efficient server and storage designs in the industry.

“I remember when I joined Facebook in 2009 feeling like a fish out of water as one of the few hardware people at a software company,” Frankovsky said.

“I’m extremely proud of the excellent hardware engineering and supply chain teams we’ve built since those early days and look forward to seeing what you all develop and share in the future.”

In an interview in September last year with AllthingsD, Frankovsky said cold storage and archiving are underserved areas in large-scale computing environments today.

“One of the storage challenges we have is that a lot of that storage that we add every day is so-called hot storage meaning that it’s storing data that’s frequently accessed for a short amount of time. And then it becomes warm and it becomes cold. The real challenge is to provide effective cold storage,” Frankovsky said in the Q&A.

“It used to be that people would use tape to archive items. But if you’re scrolling back in your timeline and want to see a photo from a few years ago, you’re not going to wait for someone to go retrieve a tape. So one of the challenges we shared with the community was around a new way to think about cold storage. You still have to maintain good retrieval speed. You can’t lose the data. But what can you do? There’s a lot of ideas being generated about it. Some are around using low write-endurance NAND flash memory chips.”

Frankovsky said he will be working closely with the OCP on his next project.

The OCP board is also extending to include long-time Linux supporter and Microsoft’s Corporate VP  of Cloud and Enterprise Bill Laing and Facebook Director of Infrastructure Jason Taylor.

Frankovsky will remain as an independent board member.

“Bill and Jason will be great additions to the community's leadership. Together we will continue to accelerate the pace of innovation in this industry and to make data center technologies more open, more efficient, and more sustainable,” Frankovsky said.

Facebook established the Open Computer Project to help drive innovation in both the industry and its own data centers. In its most recent facility in Lulea, Sweden – Lulea 1 – its data centers now use nothing other than Open Rack designs, which integrate the rack into the compute infrastructure. (You can read more about this following FOCUS’ visit this week to Lulea in FOCUS 35, out in May.)

“What started out as a crazy idea has grown up to become a project that is having a positive impact on the entire industry,” Frankovsky said.

Before working at Facebook Frankovsky was the director of data center solutions at Dell (from January 2006 to October 2009) and he was a product manager at Compaq Computer from 1992 to 1996.

Frankovsky recently took a seat on the board of Calxeda, the Texas-based maker of ARM processors and System on Chip (SoC) cards for low power servers and is working towards 64-bit fabric “and beyond”.