Computerworld - Facebook this month revealed some of the secrets behind its new next-generation data center, an IT facility in rural Prineville, Ore., that some experts say is one of the world's most efficient.
As part of the company's Open Compute Project, Facebook officials released specifications for the data center's custom-built rack-mounted servers, which they said weigh less and use more-efficient power systems than most others do. The company also disclosed its methods for cooling racks of servers without air conditioning.
The technical details are posted on the OpenCompute.org website hosted by Oregon State University's Open Source Lab.
The site explains the design of the server chassis and lists the specifications for the components used in the systems, including their AMD Opteron- and Intel Xeon-based motherboards and their power supplies.
Facebook and its Open Compute Project partners -- Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Quanta -- have been tweaking and tuning the data center specifications for about a year while working with server makers like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, Skype and Zynga to build lighter, cooler systems that are easy to repair.
"These servers are 38% more efficient than the servers we were buying previously," said Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook. The finished product also costs some 24% less than the industry average for similar servers, he added.
The bare-bones boxes aren't much to look at -- Facebook calls the design "vanity-free" -- but they get the job done. The company says the Prineville data center has a 1.07 Power Usage Effectiveness rating. Developed by the Green Grid consortium, PUE is a standard measurement for data center efficiency. The Prineville facility's 1.07 rating is well below the industry average of around 1.5, meaning it is far more efficient than most data centers.
Facebook's custom servers are about 6 pounds lighter than typical rack-mounted systems, but they're thicker. While most server racks are 1U (1.75 in.) thick, Facebook's are about 1.5U, so engineers can squeeze in taller heat sinks with more surface area and larger, more efficient fans. That means less air has to be pumped through the servers to cool them.
"We're not selling anything today, but we do hope to benefit from this -- primarily in the area of accelerating innovation," said Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design at Facebook.
Prineville's central Oregon location should help in Facebook's energy-saving efforts, City Manager Steve Forrester told Computerworld earlier this year. The city sits on a plateau at an elevation of 2,860 feet, where it's possible to use outside air to cool systems for more than half of the year, Heiliger said in a blog post.
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group, said the fact that Facebook has enough clout to drive hardware innovation says a lot about how far the company -- and the social networking sector in general -- have come. "If anybody still doubted the validity of social networking," he noted, "this kind of takes care of that."
McMillan is a reporter for the IDG News Service. Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau contributed to this story.
Read more about Data Center in Computerworld's Data Center Topic Center.
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