According to CEO Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook is feeling the benefits of designing its own energy efficient servers and today announced at the Open Compute Summit that in the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a Billion dollars.
Zuckerburg told the summit that by building their infrastructure out using the Open Compute designs, it has enabled Facebook in the last year to save the equivalent amount of energy of 40,000 homes in a year, and saved the amount of emissions equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year.
Facebook started the Open Compute Project bak in April 2011 and it has since been adopted by many other companies for open source green technology design for servers and data centers, including Intel, AMD, Box, IBM, and Microsoft.
Facebook’s VP of Engineering Jay Paraikh states that over the past three years, Open Compute designs have enabled Facebook save $1.2 Billion, and in the last year alone it is estimated that Facebook has managed to save around $52 million in energy bills thanks to the green open source design.
Facebook Open Compute Project
The project, by being open source, allows crowds to participate in improving the design of the servers, as well as contributing their optimisations to the project and improvements to the infrastructure.
Our first step for the Open Compute Project is releasing the specifications and mechanical drawings. The second step is working with the community to improve them. Please take a look, tell us what we did wrong and join us in working together to make every data center more efficient.
The whole initiative is a great idea for engineers to collaboratively design the most efficient and scalable designs for servers, storage, and data center hardware. By sharing ideas, the project can leverage the massive amounts of knowledge that exists and repay the community by offering up what clearly are some real significant numbers when it comes to savings.
You can read more about the Open Compute Project here and I suggest you do, it’s a pretty cool project.
Let us know your thoughts on the project, and Facebook’s savings – can they really have saved so much money on changing their servers alone?