By Chris Preimesberger, eWeek
Facebook, which is closing in on 1 billion registered users and is pounded by billions of transactions each minute, realized early on that it was going to need to build its own data centers. Its first one, located in the north central Oregon town of Prineville, about 80 miles south of the Columbia River and the Washington border, opened in April 2011 after a two-and-a-half-year construction period. It is custom-built for Facebook’s purposes and uses the company’s Open Compute Project architecture. Until this spring, Facebook has co-located virtually all its servers with hosting services. As part of the Open Compute Project, Facebook is publishing the specifications and mechanical designs used to construct the motherboards, power supply, server chassis as well as the server and battery cabinets for its data center. That’s unprecedented enough for a company of Facebook’s scale. But the social networking giant is also open-sourcing the specifications for its data center’s electrical and mechanical construction.
Share on Facebook