cross pond high tech

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s vice president of hardware design and supply chain optimization, who helped oversee the development and growth of the company’s custom server effort, has left the social networking company to form his own as-yet-unnamed startup that will focus on building optical storage for the enterprise.

In an interview, Frankovsky said he had resigned from Facebook last week to pursue this idea. Meanwhile, Jason Taylor, Facebook’s director of infrastructure, has assumed responsibility for the hardware design and supply chain teams at Facebook and will continue working with the Open Compute Project on Facebook’s behalf.

Taylor has been overseeing much of that work for the last year, according to Facebook, and he will also be joining the Open Compute Foundation board along with Bill Laing, corporate VP of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. This brings the OCP Foundation board from five to seven participants. Frankovsky, who will remain chairman and president of the OCP board, will stay as an independent member.