An image from the Open Compute Project, showing some of Facebook's data center design
Every now and then, an exciting or controversial issue triggers a flood of online discourse. For our Noise Filter feature, the WHIR pans the raging rivers of opinion for shining nuggets of useful commentary.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — On Thursday, the social media giant Facebook (www.facebook.com) announced that it had launched the Open Compute Project, a program through which the company, consumer of some massive data center capacity, would share the custom engineered technology it used in designing its dedicated facility in Prineville, Oregon.
Understandably, the Open Compute Project was the biggest news in the data center business yesterday, with news outlets across the Internet racing to post up content about the project’s launch. Technology commenters spent the day attempting to make sense of the move. Why did Facebook open its technology? What pieces of the Open Compute Project can data center designers use? How much does the Open Compute Project matter?
We at the WHIR thought a digest of some of the most salient commentary on the project would be a good way to help those who aren’t quite sure what to make of Facebook’s open source offering digest the news. As such, we turn to our “Noise Filter” feature format.
In a Bloomberg/GigaOm post, Katie Fehrenbacher emphasized the Facebook project as a key demonstration of the growing demands around energy efficient data center design.
“This is the latest example of how energy-efficient and green data centers are now—a must-have competitive advantage for a leading Internet company. The various energy-efficient innovations that Facebook unveiled today are largely best practices that such companies as Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) follow and that organizations like the Green Grid and the Environmental Protection Agency support.”
Rich Miller, of Data Center Knowledge, pointed out that data center design is usually a closely guarded secret at any technology company.
“Many leading data center providers are secretive about the details of their data center designs and operations (see The Fight Club Rule of Data Center Secrecy), believing any proprietary designs offer a competitive advantage over business rivals. Other companies cite security concerns in electing to cloak their data center operations in secrecy.”
In the San Francisco Gate, an article by Matt Rosoff says Facebook was trying to commoditize Google’s optimization work in data center technology, the way IBM sought to commoditize the OS market with its support for Linux, or the way Google itself is working to commoditize the smart phone technology market with Android.
“Facebook is finding itself in the same business [as Google] — it writes software and sells ads, but what it’s really doing is figuring out a way to make gobs of money from hardware running in a data center somewhere.
But is still tiny compared with Google. It has about one tenth the employees and revenue. It’s been leasing its data center space for seven years. It would take tons of funding and five years or more to equal Google’s data center footprint.
So instead, Facebook took some of its smartest engineers and had them design their ideal data center from scratch. They came up with something that looks really good — it’s more reliable and uses way less power than the average data center today.
Then they opened it to the world. Now, any company interested in building or improving their own data centers — can take that design and improve on it and build it into their own data centers.”
There was plenty of positive reaction to the Open Compute Project architecture from within the technology industry. A post on the Rackspace Cloud blog included an interview with Rackspace CEO Graham Weston, conducted by Rackspace Employee and social media star Robert Scoble. In the interview, Weston discusses comments he made at the project’s launch day, saying Rackspace had thrown out some of its own in-house data center designs in favor of technology offered in Facebook’s data center architecture.
Not everyone was head over heels for the news. In a ZDNet post, Dan Kusnetzky wrote that the Open Compute Project designs were an exciting step, the technology might not be ready for primetime deployments in enterprise data centers.
“While it appears that Facebook likes and uses its data center and system designs, it is not at all clear that the same designs will work everywhere, for every purpose, for everyone…
While I found Facebook’s reference designs an interesting attempt to push the state of the art forward. I’m not convinced that their reference designs will meet all of the requirements that today’s systems must meet to be commercially viable.”
If you saw any other interesting commentary out there on the Open Compute Project, please add a link in the comments section below.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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