Facebook Open Commute Data Center Project

Facebook discloses infrastructure designs and specifications of its new Prineville Data Center in Oregon, USA.

Details of Facebook’s breakthrough energy efficient data center design, named the “Open Commute Data Center Project” such as its customized server designs, power supplies and UPS (un-interruptable power supply) units are available for all to see.

Following Facebook’s announcement of the Open Commute Data Center Project, gaming giant Zynga indicated that it is also considering adopting the concept into the infrastructure of its data centers. There was also a great deal of interest in the Open Commute Data Center Project from the cloud computing provider Rackspace as well as from Dell who confirmed that they were already testing the open commute motherboard system on some of its servers in the US.

Facebook is publishing the specifications and mechanical CAD files under the Open Web Foundation license, which grants a “worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, copyright license, without any obligation for accounting to Facebook, to reproduce, prepare derivative works … and implement the specification to the full extent,” a spokesman from Facebook said.

Many of the key elements to the infrastructure design of the Open Commute Project will be kept under very tight security. This comes as no surprise since the vast majority of data center entities across the globe still rely heavily on traditional (and un-economical) power distribution & UPS infrastructure which would obviously cost huge amounts of money to either rebuild from scratch or retrofit.

Cooling – the secret weapon

One thing we do know about the design of the Open Commute Data Center Project is that the cooling system uses fresh air as opposed to traditional data center cooling systems which rely on air conditioning for temperature control.

Dell, HP and Intel are among some of the tech companies that co-developed this technology with Facebook. Dell’s Data Center Infrastructure Solutions business will design and produce a new range of servers based on the Open Compute Project system.

“Facebook has contributed advanced reference designs for ongoing data center and hardware innovation,” said Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager for Worldwide Server Platforms for Dell. “We look forward to collaborating with like-minded technology providers and partners as we seek ways to learn from and further advance these designs.”

Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace, stated that some of the ideas designed by Facebook and released in the Open Compute project could save the company millions of dollars in power consumption costs. “We have been developing our own IP (intellectual property) in the data center, and we’ll be flushing some of that to go with the Open Compute design.”

With companies like Facebook spearheading the global campaign for the development of enhanced energy efficient data centers, the future is looking bright for our ever-increasing love for super fast internet speeds and our bandwidth hungry,  file sharing addiction to social media platforms.