Taiwanese company Quanta – one of the suppliers of custom-designed servers to Facebook – has launched a subsidiary that will sell hardware on the general market.

Quanta says its “off-the-shelf product line” is designed to specifications of the Open Compute Project (OCP) – an open-source hardware project started by Facebook. Servers Quanta supplies to Facebook use design specs that have been released through OCP.

The company made the announcement earlier this week at the Open Compute Summit hosted at Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.

The product line, sold by a new Quanta subsidiary QCT, includes servers, storage and networking gear. Quanta says its products are different from other vendors’ in that they are stripped of “excessive feature sets that often plague conventional equipment with unnecessary cost and complexity.”

The mother company, Quanta, is an original design manufacturer (ODM), which means it designs and manufactures equipment itself, from start to finish. This is different from the well-known IT vendors, such as HP, Dell or IBM, who design their products but outsource manufacturing.

The majority of Quanta’s business has been making high volumes of custom-designed hardware for large companies. Thus, adding an off-the-shelf product line through QCT is a major shift for the company.

QCT general manager and VP Mike Yang said, “For the first time, customers can take advantage of Quanta's outstanding engineering and integrated datacenter solutions in an OCP rack, even if they're not large enough to require a full-service original design manufacturer.”

The OCP rack is a rack specification developed by Facebook and released through OCP. Both HP and Dell – also major suppliers to Facebook – announced hardware products that met the rack’s requirements at this week’s summit.

In addition to the ODM business, Quanta also sells high-compute-density servers designed specifically for cloud-computing loads. Codenamed S2Q, the machine is built around many-core processors by Tilera, a Silicon Valley chip maker Quanta backs financially.