(image courtesy of TechCrunch)
Usually when we talk about “Open Sourcing” things in the tech world, we refer to software code. However, Facebook is doing something fairly unique for a company its size today by sharing its server infrastructure with the world today at a Facebook HQ event.
What does that mean? Basically, Facebook has given anyone the blueprint to construct the same computer hardware servers that power their service along with the data center buildings that house those servers. It’s significant, because large companies such as Facebook operate at such a large scale that they’ve put a lot of resources to constructing an infrastructure that is extremely energy efficient. Facebook’s two-year old data center in Prineville, Oregon has a power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.07 which is well below the EPA’s “best practice” number of 1.5. One of the most innovative features of their hardware server design allows for the computers to run in a more humid environment, which in turn allows the building to be cooled via evaporation, rather than needing to run an air conditioner.
If you’re a real IT junkie, GigaOM has some of the specifications of the computer servers Facebook uses:
-
The outside is 1.2mm zinc pre-plated, corrosion-resistant steel with no front panel and no ads.
-
The parts snap together: the motherboard snaps into place using a series of mounting holes on the chassis, and the hard drive uses snap-in rails and slides into the drive bay. The unit only has one screw for grounding. It’s like Container Store does cheap servers and someone at Facebook built an entire server in three minutes.
-
Hold onto your chassis because the server is 1.5u tall about 50 percent taller than other servers to make room for larger and more efficient heat sinks.
-
Check out how this scales. It has a reboot on LAN feature, which lets a systems administrator instantly reboot a server by sending specific network instructions.
-
The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.
-
The power supply accepts both A/C and D/C power, allowing the server to switch to D/C backup battery power in the event of a power outage.
-
There are two flavors of processor with the Intel motherboard offering two Xeon 5500 series or 5600 series processors, up to 144GB memory and an Intel 5500 I/O Hub chip.
-
AMD fans can choose two AMD Magny-Cours 12 and 8 core CPUs, the AMD SR5650 chipset for I/O, and up to a maximum 192GB of memory.
Now, not every startup company requires an entire data center for their services (nor could they probably afford such a thing), but it’s still a really magnanimous gesture by Facebook to release these specifications. It’ll not only help out companies who have reached that size (like Twitter) to efficiently spend their IT resources, it’ll help the internet and environment as a whole with less energy waste.
Not only that, it’s also obviously a great PR move by Facebook whose image has taken hits in recent years over privacy concerns. Google, on the other hand, is still notorious for being tight-lipped about their own hardware infrastructure. Who’s the one “Not Being Evil” these days?
Facebook has also produced a short video about the Open Compute Project:
Read More: Facebook Open Sources its Servers and Data Centers: Cloud Computing News «.
