Facebook open servers

With the need to serve daily more than 600 million users, it is logical to assume that the infrastructure of Facebook is truly impressive. Servers, data centers, redundancy and cooling systems, everything must be planned and implemented carefully. At the same time, the need to expand capacity leads to higher consumption of energy, but that too has been taken into account. If you want to know how servers are Facebook, and most should not asking you, as well as design specifications have been declared open, under the "Open Compute."

We know very well who are the giants of the Web today, but in general, not much is known about how computer operating level. In the case of Google, we have seen some details on the Googleplex, and also is a known fact that creates its own hardware for their servers, but nothing more. After all, no titan of information and communications technology has a habit of sharing secrets. But in an era where information sharing is the rule rather than the exception, something has decided to show the world how they are made systems that keep it standing. That something is nothing more than Facebook, through the Open Compute project.


This project began just over a year, with a huge goal: Build the infrastructure more efficiently with the least possible cost. At first it seems a contradiction, because the more drastic needs to be a reduction in energy consumption, more investment in time and money often sue. Without emabrgo, the results are obvious to all, literally, and that anyone interested can download the specifications of these servers (hardware are based on Intel or AMD), and CAD designs for each component. Taken into account details at different scales, from the chassis to a server (without screws, can be assembled in minutes) to the configuration to use cooling data center servers.

One of the reasons why Facebook has decided to open these designs is, of course, to receive data and user feedback. And the other reason is so that developers who start a Web-wide project to leverage the work that Facebook has done so far. The numbers are very interesting: In comparison with average server, the Facebook design is 38 percent more efficient, and 24 percent cheaper. From replace internal speakers and LED lights, to virtually eliminate plastic and aesthetic reduce to a minimum, the Open Compute servers unattractive features in the visual, but extraordinary in functional, and much greener than we are accustomed to see.