LinuxQuestions.org - Facebook Saved A Billion Dollars By Building Open Sourced Servers

Quote:

Facebook is reaping the benefits of designing its own energy efficient servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.”

Facebook started the Open Compute Project back in April 2011 and its since blossomed into an industry-spanning coalition of companies that open source green technology designs for servers, data centers, and more. It includes Intel, AMD, Bloomberg, Box, Cumulus Networks, IBM, and Microsoft.

While the Open Compute Project has saved the world a lot of energy, it’s also cut back on energy Facebook would have had to pay for. Zuckerberg proudly told interviewer Tim O’Reilly on stage at the Summit that “In just the last year we’ve saved 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.”

Along with helping the environment, the project lets Facebook crowdsource improvements to its infrastructure and allows multiple vendors to produce identical equipment that gives Facebook supply chain diversity. The whole thing is probably a great engineer recruiting tool too.

More at TechCrunch...

What are your thoughts on the Open Compute Project? Did you know LQ justed passed 100,000 fans on fb?

--jeremy