Steve Helvie of the OCP Foundation talks efficiency and sustainability through the adoption of open source data centre design
Open source software has been an important aspect of technological development for decades . The ability to create , peer review and release code and applications to the community at large accelerates the pace of innovation . However , until relatively recently , it was rare to find organisations and enterprises taking the same approach to hardware .
In 2009 , Facebook undertook a fundamental transformation of the way it approached its digital infrastructure . “ As they began to outgrow their infrastructure , they made the decision to start building their own data centres ,” explains Steve Helvie , VP of channel development at the OpenCompute Project Foundation ( OCP ) “ As they started to look at that process , they outlined a number of factors for building a facility from the ground up . They were looking at what they could get rid of – what a data centre doesn ’ t need – how to run servers hotter and so on .”
A small team spent two years building a hyperscale data centre which ended up being 38 % more energy efficient to build and 24 % less expensive to run than the company ’ s previous facilities . Following the project ’ s success , Facebook spun out the Open Compute Project in collaboration with Intel , Rackspace , Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim .
35 datacentremagazine . com