MISSION CRITICAL
“ BACK IN 2009 Facebook seized the opportunity to create what it termed the ‘ vanity free ’ server with less features to save cost , but more importantly improve reliability and logistics by omitting the parts you don ’ t need to combine weight reduction with improved energy efficiencies .”
The Open Compute Project ’ s ( OCP ) CTO Bill Carter is reflecting on a series of events , triggered by Facebook ’ s exponential growth , which led to the social media giant designing the world ’ s most efficient data centre after a small team of engineers spent two years building one from the ground up : software , servers , racks , power supplies , and cooling .
“ These servers were designed for large scale outs . 10 years ago , Google , Microsoft and Facebook were all scaling up and making a huge impact on the data centre footprint so it made sense for them to do this . Facebook realised early on the differentiation was in their application and social media app , not as a hardware supplier . What ’ s not talked about is that the innovation within these servers had become stagnant . Reference designs came from Intel and those designs were duplicated
36 May 2018