Facebook’s “Open Compute Project”: Their Server/Datacenter Expertise Now Open To All

We're live today at a Facebook event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. They've already noted that this event won't be about a consumer facing product, but instead will be about the underlying technology that powers the service. And to that end, they've announced a new iniative, The Open Compute Project. So what is it? Facebook is opening up the specifications and design documents that went into creating their customized servers and datacenters. According to Facebook, these are much more efficient than the industry standards out there right now — especially if you're specially building social applications. In fact, Facebook says their servers are 38 percent more efficient than the off-the-shelf ones they were buying previously. And that has meant a 24 percent cost savings.