Facebook dings Google by releasing its Open Compute Project, open sourcing its hardware and data center specs for use by other companies who need to scale.
Facebook April 7 launched its Open Compute Project, an unprecedented play to
open source the specifications it employs for its hardware and data center to
efficiently power a social network comprising 600 million-plus people.
For the
Open
Compute Project, Facebook is publishing specs and mechanical designs used
to construct its motherboards, power supply, server chassis, and server and
battery cabinets.
GigaOm has hard data points on the specs.
The company is also open sourcing specs for its data center's electrical and
mechanical construction, including technical specs and mechanical CAD files.
The move is a significant departure from strategies of other companies, such
as Google, Twitter, and Amazon, which closely guard their data center and
hardware specifications to maintain a competitive edge in the cutthroat cloud-computing
market.
"We think it's time to demystify the biggest capital expense of an
online business-the infrastructure," said Jonathan Heiliger, vice
president of technical operations at Facebook, at a media event at the
company's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters today.
Facebook
broke ground on its first dedicated data center in Prineville,
Ore., in January 2010. The data center employs an evaporative cooling system to
cool the incoming air, as opposed to traditional chiller systems that require
more energy-intensive equipment.
With the assistance of chipmakers AMD and Intel and server providers HP and
Dell, Facebook engineers have spent tens of millions of dollars building custom
servers and power supplies in the past year.
These data center solutions delivered a 38 percent increase in energy
efficiency at 24 percent lower cost compared with Facebook's existing
facilities, claimed Heiliger.
Moreover, this technology enabled the data center to earn an initial power
usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.07, pushing it well below the
Environmental Protection Agency's standard mark of 1.5.
The Green Grid's PUE is an indicator of data center energy efficiency, and
Facebook's Prineville plant ranks as good as it gets for a major data center.
Dell said it will design and build servers based on the Open Compute Project
specification. Moreover, Synnex Corporation will sell Open Compute Project
servers, which Facebook designed to be "vanity-free," or without the
aesthetic bells and whistles of existing rack servers.
That means they feature no paint, logos, stickers, or front panel, saving
more than 6 pounds of materials per server, explained Amir Michael, manager of
hardware design and server-design overview for Facebook.
James Hamilton, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web
Services, toured Facebook's Prineville data center in February and came away
impressed by what he saw.
"I saw an unusually large number of elegant designs ranging from one of
the cleanest mechanical systems I've come across, three phase 480VAC directly
to the rack, a low-voltage, direct current, distributed uninterruptable power
supply system, all the way through to custom server designs," Hamilton
wrote on his
personal blog.
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