| 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. |