Today at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook and a collection of partners such as Dell, Intel and AMD — as well as kindred spirits like RackSpace’s founder (the company behind OpenStack) and the CIO of the Department of Energy — are on hand to reveal the details behind Facebook’s first custom-built data center and to announce the Open Compute project.
Efficiency: saving energy and cost
The big message behind Facebook’s new data center, located in Prineville Oregon, is one of efficiency and openness. The facility will use servers and technology that deliver a 38 percent gain ìn energy efficiency. To bring the knowledge that the company and its partners have gained in constructing this hyper-efficient hyper-scale data center Facebook is announcing the Open Compute project.
Much the way open source software shares the code behind the software, the Open Compute project has been created to provide the specifications behind the hardware. As a result, Facebook will be publishing the specs for the technology used in their data center’s servers, power supplies, racks, battery backup systems and building design. By releasing these specs, Facebook is looking to promote the sharing of data center and server technology best practices across the industry.
How does Dell fit in?
Dell, which has a long relationship with Facebook, has been collaborating on the Open Compute project. Dell’s Data Center Solutions group has designed and built a data center solution using components from the Open Compute project and the server portion of that solution will be on display today at Facebook’s event. Additionally Forrest Norrod, Dell’s GM of server platforms will be a member of the panel at the event talking about the two companies’ common goal of designing the next generation of hyper efficient data centers.
A bit of history
Dell first started working with Facebook back in 2008 when they had a “mere” 62 million active users. At that time the three primary areas of focus in with regards to the Facebook IT infrastructure were:
- Decreasing power usage
- Creating purpose-built servers to match Facebook’s tiered infrastructure needs
- Having tier 1 dedicated engineering resources to meet custom product and service needs
Over the last three-plus years, as Facebook has grown to over 500 million active users, Dell has spefically helped out to address these challenges by:
- Building custom solutions to meet Facebook’s evolving needs, from custom-designed servers for their web cache, to memcache systems to systems supporting their database tiers.
- Delivering these unique servers quickly and cost effectively via Dell’s global supply chain. Our motto is “arrive and live in five”, so within five hours of the racks of servers arriving at the dock doors, they’re live and helping to support Facebook’s 500 million users.
- Achieving the greatest performance with the highest possible efficiency. Within one year, as the result of Dell’s turnkey rack integration and deployment services, we were able to save Facebook 84,000 pounds of corrugated cardboard and 39,000 pounds of polystyrene during that same year.
Congratulations Facebook! And thank you for focusing on both open sharing and on energy efficiency from the very beginning!
Pau for now…
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Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 