How does Facebook build their massive server infrastructure? You don’t care? You might after you hear why, see how and download the 3D models they use to make the servers that store all your private information. This is Facebook’s bread and butter. They’ve opened up how they build their data centers and how they’ve developed the units to be lighter, more efficient, and less pretty. It’s an amazing project being supported by the likes of Dell, HP, AMD, Intel, Rackspace and others. It’s called the Open Compute Project and it’s all laid out for your hardware building obsession.
In the same vein as Backblaze and their open hardware initiative (which gives the complete breakdown on how to build cheap petabyte storage), Open Compute is focused on simple and efficient.
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.
You can find out more on the servers here as well as download Specs, DXF and SolidWorks parts/assemblies of everything from the chassis to the power supply.
Big thanks to Steve Burke who sent this in and can carry 10 of these servers on his back and update his Facebook status at the same time!
