What’s the secret behind these savings? The company honored its hacker roots by custom-designing both the data center itself, and the servers (and management tools) inside it, from the ground up. It’s akin to what Google has been doing for the past 10 years or so, but the good news is that–unlike Google–Facebook has not kept what it has achieved and how it has achieved it a secret at all.
In fact the reverse is true: following the open-source software model, Facebook turned its server, server management, storage, rack, electrical, cooling and overall data center designs over to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation, a not-for-profit with some heavyweight names on its board including Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Arista Networks as well as Facebook. The OCP Foundation has formalized Facebook’s designs into OCP specifications, and these specifications are freely available and anyone can contribute improvements to them.