Microsoft has announced that it will contribute to the Open Compute Project a community whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing . Microsoft will contribute cloud server specifications, which cover the hardware used by Microsoft te deliver cloud services like Windows Azure, Office 365, Bing and others. More information about the specification can be found here.
Microsoft also announced that it will open source the software code used to manage hardware operations.