SAN JOSE – Facebook struck an alliance with China’s Tencent and Baidu to merge separate designs for data center racks. The move is one small step toward the social networking giant’s goal of a broad data center specification.

At a summit event in San Antonio, Facebook announced it is working with the two China Web service providers to converge their server rack design called Project Scorpio with Facebook’s Open Rack spec. The trio expects to have a single spec available in 2013.

The effort is apparently focused on the rack itself, the mechanical enclosure which contains the servers, storage, switches and wiring in a large Web 2.0 data center. Separately Facebook announced several companies are developing data center systems based around the specs emerging from its Open Compute Project (OCP) launched in April 2011.

More than 500 people are attending an OCP summit now being held in San Antonio, Texas. Sessions from the summit can be viewed live online. ...