Facebook kicked off its “Open Compute Project” — an initiative to share its data center expertise with the industry as a whole.
Facebook claims its Oregon data center is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers, making it one of the most efficient in the world. Specifically:
- Facebook’s energy consumption per unit of computing power has declined by 38% with the new facility.
- The new data center has a PUE of 1.073, well below the EPA-defined state-of-the-art industry average of 1.51. This means 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every Open Compute server.
- Facebook has removed centralized chillers, eliminated traditional inline UPS systems and removed a 480V to 208V transformation.
- Facebook is using Ethernet-powered LED lighting and passive cooling infrastructure reduce energy spent on running the facility.
Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook is sharing the specifications of its “vanity-free” servers, which use barebones AMD and Intel motherboards optimized for low-power. Facebook is sharing all of its data center designs in hopes that others will adopt them. The company is also welcoming others “to tell us where we screwed up”http://opencompute.org/http://www.facebook.com