Since Facebook kicked off the Open Compute Project by donating its overall data center design, the OCP Foundation has been chipping away at open sourcing designs for all of the critical components that go into the data center. Next up: network switches.
In a keynote speech at Interop, Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed two years of progress at expanding the scope of the project, which now includes open designs for server racks and cold storage designs based on how Facebook handles your old photos.
These designs are geared for very high performance and scalability, but also for energy efficiency. The industry average is that a data center will consume about 1.9 times as much electrical power as actually makes it to a server delivering compute services because of waste in the process, including electrical conversions and air conditioning demands. By minimizing the need for conversions and eliminating air conditioning, Facebook has been able to reduce that factor to about 1.07, Frankovsky said, which translates into an operational cost savings of about 38 percent. The design also reduced the capital expense budget by 24 percent.