Now if only there was a company whose non-core competency was Google-style spelling check ("Did you mean to search for..")
Was anything mentioned about the OS running the servers ? I presume it is an optimized linux, but who knows.
The only thing I could come up with is that, anyone implementing these at scale (fb's competitors) has already committed substantial dollar amounts to existing infrastructure.
To leverage the minor improvements in design that will come of this, they would have to start by rolling out new facebook style racks/data centers.
Whereas, for facebook any design improvements would be easier to implement on a larger scale.
Either that or they are just do-gooders, which I highly doubt.
The fact they were making their own equipment, incorporating UPS functions in the power supplies of their servers, how they were cooling - the fact they get the cheapest cabling possible etc etc all played to their competitive advantage.
Highly efficient low cost commodity gear results directly in lower TCO / OPEX thus allowing you to do more where it counts.
With the mass defection of high level folks from google to facebook, and with the very agile innovative team that facebook has, it is just expected that strides in these areas would occur there as well.
This is one area where I have a lot of respect for what facebook is doing.
The impact may not be direct to tiny web companies - but organizations that have massive energy costs, specifically hospitals, can greatly benefit from this information.
The problem is though that hospitals are not IT companies, and thus they dont focus on the physical characteristics of their equipment or directly look at the designs of their datacenters as they buy gear from the big names we all know.
If companies like google and facebook work to get the suppliers to incorporate these design elements - it will result in organizations like hospitals benefiting in the long term. This is a good thing.
El Camino Hospital in Mountain View pays over $500K PER MONTH in power. Imagine if they can reduce that by say 20%
The biggest take away I have in looking at this information is the POE LED Lighting. I am really interested in this because of the impact it has on the overall electrical infrastructure in a large building.
Currently, you design your infrastructure so that you have emergency power backing your MPOE, DC and IDFs. This means that the more POE devices you have off the IDF, when utility power goes out, your supporting those devices via the UPS/generator infrastructure.
If you add lighting to this, its going to redistribute costs from the electrical/infrastructure expense to install and power the lighting, to adding a port on the switch and the requisite load on the IT side. I assume that the wattage per lumins could be less - and the overall cost of emergency lighting could be reduced in a very large facility.
This is right in line with the idea of "Technology is a utility" -- the number of devices and range of services we now hang off the network is amazing - lighting is just another example, and this will ultimately simplify and reduce the wiring infrastructure in your building.
The more things they can throw at Google, especially now as the organization is digesting the CEO transition is nothing but win for Facebook.
If FB can cause these servers to be offered as standard configurations and produced in (much) higher volumes than when produced as custom solutions built for for FB (or Google), then the costs to FB drop, and FB can potentially also get the vendors to compete with each other.
It's a clever move.
(If you're just running big DCs, and not looking to move into the cloud hosting business.)
