by Jack Clark, ZDNet
Summary: A look behind the scenes of Facebook’s hardware lab, the spiritual home of the Open Compute datacentre hardware movement, which may radically change the type of IT enterprises use, and who they buy it from. Amir Michael, Facebook’s manager of system engineering, is stood in the company’s hardware lab trying not to get in the way of the assorted engineers, wheelie-chairs and bottles of water scattered around the room, describing Facebook’s attempt to democratise hardware. “We’re trying to take away a lot of the uniqueness of server design” to create a “clean, open canvas” for companies to base their datacentres around, he explains. What Amir is talking about are the server and storage systems that Facebook uses in its datacentres and how the social-networking leader is hoping that by publishing the designs and specifications of this low-power, low-cost hardware, it can reduce the cost of infrastructure for businesses large and small.
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