Facebook open sources data centers

[Sabre]

http://opencompute.org/

We started a project at Facebook a little over a year ago with a pretty big goal: to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost.
We decided to honor our hacker roots and challenge convention by custom designing and building our software, servers and data centers from the ground up.

The result is a data center full of vanity free servers which is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.

But we didn't want to keep it all for ourselves. Instead, we decided to collaborate with the entire industry and create the Open Compute Project, to share these technologies as they evolve.

At first I didn't post it because... well, I didn't see anything too revolutionary, however, I realized not everyone might have seen something like this and I have been in a TON of datacenters that were really poorly designed. I very much agree with this statement:

Facebook's head of operations Jonathan Heiliger is right to suggest: "It's time to stop treating data centers like Fight Club."

VERY true. Very happy to see this

As a small update, here is a photo tour of their Pineville facility.

[complacent]

all the big guys have been rolling their own. google went towards dc power, facetubebookspaceplace is trying nekkid.

i can dig it.

[Raven]

google went towards dc power

This is a fascinating idea to me. Do away with the power rectifiers in all the server power supplies and the power inverters in all the UPS. It's rather ingenious.

[Sabre]

Telco's have been doing it for years They usually use 48V (or sometimes 24V) DC.

It's good to see progress being made in this arena, that's for sure.

[PGT]

if you control everything that's inside your four walls, you can make those design decisions. when you run a multi-tenant datacenter, its not possible. NetApp has a brilliant design down in RTP but it doesn't port to anything other than the enterprise self-built model. That said, an alternate method is to outsource the construction and O&M of the shell itself and just run tech ops; Digital Realty Trust, DupontFabros and COPT are REITs that specialize in this area.

We had DLR (Digital Realty) "build to suit" for our facility in Amsterdam and then a tenant lease model because it made more sense (i.e. the CAPEX wasn't all on us).