[yanw]

Not sure how many startups built their own servers anymore, this event seems like a response to the Greenpeace accusations of Facebook's environmental responsibility or wherever.

Edit: I agree it's a good thing, it's just that hosting a press event rather than just making the announcement through a blog post suggests other motives as well.

[flyt]

This isn't a response to Greenpeace, this is a response to the real costs that it takes to run compute infrastructure at the scale of Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

If a datacenter can run at 1.07 PUE (as Facebook's new datacenter does), then it directly translates to massive power cost savings. Environmental efficiency just comes along with it.

[kragen]

Okay, but why does it benefit Facebook's bottom line (and Google's!) to open-source that stuff? Wouldn't they be better off if their competitors had to pay those higher costs? It's not as if they have substantial computation-service providers they're buying from, or data-center-oriented companies they're selling to.

[ChuckMcM]

The upside is that FB can tweak Google's nose (who has a very high opinion internally of how good they are at operational efficiency) and interest some of Google's operations folks. They get to dispell some of the mystery and disbelief at Google's efficiency claims. If Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon hasn't yet figured out 21st century data centers they give them a big eye opener so that those guys are more competitive against Google as well. (there is a reason Google abandoned shipping containers :-)

The more things they can throw at Google, especially now as the organization is digesting the CEO transition is nothing but win for Facebook.

[j3kuntz]

They are hoping that the same philosophies which apply to open source software will benefit Facebook providing open source hardware. They mention a few goals they have during the talk. Mainly that they hope people will offer criticism and help them improve the technology. Facebook's core competency is not hardware so any improvements to the hardware sector directly benefit Facebook's bottom-line.

[joshus]

Facebook's core advantage is the social graph, not the infrastructure operation, which is Google's thing. Consequently, Facebook has tight grip on the access of its graph whereas Google keeps the secrets about its search algorithm and server setup. By open-source it, Facebook is not only getting good PR but also undercutting the competitor.

[zipdog]

This is a nice benefit of two companies competing asynchronously (each has a different core competency). The open source community gets the non-core competency of both.

Now if only there was a company whose non-core competency was Google-style spelling check ("Did you mean to search for..")

[riffer]

Now if only there was a company whose non-core competency was Google-style spelling check

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251071.aspx

[chopsueyar]

Sweet, we get self-driving cars and commodity headless servers.

[Hoff]

To get custom computing gear built, you have to show your designs and plans and requirements to various potential vendors, so (and NDA or not) the vendors now know what you're doing.

If FB can cause these servers to be offered as standard configurations and produced in (much) higher volumes than when produced as custom solutions built for for FB (or Google), then the costs to FB drop, and FB can potentially also get the vendors to compete with each other.

It's a clever move.

(If you're just running big DCs, and not looking to move into the cloud hosting business.)

[jawn]

I too had this same thought.

The only thing I could come up with is that, anyone implementing these at scale (fb's competitors) has already committed substantial dollar amounts to existing infrastructure.

To leverage the minor improvements in design that will come of this, they would have to start by rolling out new facebook style racks/data centers.

Whereas, for facebook any design improvements would be easier to implement on a larger scale.

Either that or they are just do-gooders, which I highly doubt.

[teaspoon]

And if competitors do adopt FB's infrastructure, they'll essentially be training their engineers to work at Facebook. They'd better have counteroffer packages ready.

[jemfinch]

Releasing information about this helps others better compete with Facebook's competitors while not diminishing the value of Facebook's core asset at all.

[cosmicray]

Should the design proliferate into other DCs, it would provide a ready disaster recovery base (perhaps even sharing agreements between different operators).

Was anything mentioned about the OS running the servers ? I presume it is an optimized linux, but who knows.

[scottmac]

It's just CentOS

[chopsueyar]

They probably compete for the same finite electrical sources, too.

[phlux]

It's not about the fact that open sourcing this info affects their bottom line as much as it is about responsibly contributing to the progress and advancement of computing... however it should be noted that for years, google has been very secretive about all aspects of its internal DC designs.

The fact they were making their own equipment, incorporating UPS functions in the power supplies of their servers, how they were cooling - the fact they get the cheapest cabling possible etc etc all played to their competitive advantage.

Highly efficient low cost commodity gear results directly in lower TCO / OPEX thus allowing you to do more where it counts.

With the mass defection of high level folks from google to facebook, and with the very agile innovative team that facebook has, it is just expected that strides in these areas would occur there as well.

This is one area where I have a lot of respect for what facebook is doing.

The impact may not be direct to tiny web companies - but organizations that have massive energy costs, specifically hospitals, can greatly benefit from this information.

The problem is though that hospitals are not IT companies, and thus they dont focus on the physical characteristics of their equipment or directly look at the designs of their datacenters as they buy gear from the big names we all know.

If companies like google and facebook work to get the suppliers to incorporate these design elements - it will result in organizations like hospitals benefiting in the long term. This is a good thing.

El Camino Hospital in Mountain View pays over $500K PER MONTH in power. Imagine if they can reduce that by say 20%

The biggest take away I have in looking at this information is the POE LED Lighting. I am really interested in this because of the impact it has on the overall electrical infrastructure in a large building.

Currently, you design your infrastructure so that you have emergency power backing your MPOE, DC and IDFs. This means that the more POE devices you have off the IDF, when utility power goes out, your supporting those devices via the UPS/generator infrastructure.

If you add lighting to this, its going to redistribute costs from the electrical/infrastructure expense to install and power the lighting, to adding a port on the switch and the requisite load on the IT side. I assume that the wattage per lumins could be less - and the overall cost of emergency lighting could be reduced in a very large facility.

This is right in line with the idea of "Technology is a utility" -- the number of devices and range of services we now hang off the network is amazing - lighting is just another example, and this will ultimately simplify and reduce the wiring infrastructure in your building.

[flyt]

You can buy the lighting yourself, it's from Redwood Systems: http://www.redwoodsystems.com/products

[nroman]

This is true. However, the services that startups use to host their servers (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.) could adopt these practices in new datacenters because the specs are open. This could lower costs for the startups that use these services, and be good for the environment.

Seems like everyone wins.

[vl]

Any large scale service already adopted such practices, may be not to the same degree. All large players buy custom hardware with specific tweaks to be more energy (read cost) efficient.

[toddmorey]

"Graham Weston, the chairman of Rackspace, said that his company would use the new Open Compute servers in its own designs, and Zynga's chief technical officer said that his company would take a serious look at adding the new technology to its own cloud." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383257,00.asp

[ChuckMcM]

The question comes up a lot when you're building very large scale applications. When does it make sense to have your own infrastructure vs using someone else's (like Amazon's).

If you're running 'one' thing (like say a hadoop farm) and you can optimize out the things you don't need, there can be a pretty durable benefit in building your own machines.

People like Rackable, HP, Dell, or IBM who sell servers need to build them able to do 'anything' you might want, in order to do that cost effectively they often put things on the mother board (lowest marginal cost) which are perhaps not useful in all cases. However, when you're using lots of machines you have to power and cool those unused sound chips and USB hub chips, and may firewire ports that aren't really all that useful to a web app.

I talk about it as 'rack level' blades, basically motherboards on a cookie sheet that only have network and storage interfaces. Taking away a size constraint makes building them a lot easier (you don't need a custom backplane for example, you just plug cables in)

[newmediaclay]

The only other motive it suggests is garnering as much publicity for their innovation/company as they can. Facebook is notorious for being able to magnify a small announcement into a big event and reap the dividends -- remember the announcement of a redesign via 60 minutes? If you can get media and influences to come pay attention to cool stuff you're doing, why wouldn't you?

[kellysutton]

blip.tv builds and maintains our own servers and data centers. We started before the Cloud though :)

[chopsueyar]

Correction. You created the Cloud.