Yesterday, April 07, Facebook unveiled a new behind-the-scenes data server technology to the plethora of IT industry insiders at their headquarters in Palo Alto. According to mashable.com, at the press event dedicated to the launch of the project, executives from DreamWorks, VMWare, Fidelity, Delta, Dell, Apple and AMD got together to see the newest initiative by Facebook. Finally, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has introduced a new ‘technological initiative’ by the brand entitled Opencompute Project.

Image: mashable.com

In a nutshell, Facebook has designed a server system that is much more cost-effective and efficient in terms of workload and energy consumption than what modern-day tech industry has to offer. According to Facebook, their own servers are 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive than the ones they had to buy previously.

Another key characteristic of Facebook data server is that, as Facebook hardware design manager Amir Michael puts it, it is «vanity free. It is not beautiful, but it gets the job done». Over 18 months, which took the company to build their own data server, the tech minds fought over building the most efficient server at minimal costs. As a result, the structure of the server includes only the basic equipment to ensure comprehensive and stable functionality,which made the developers get rid of all decorative elements and parts that consume energy without providing any important functionality.

Visit opencompute.org for more technical details on Opencompute project.

«By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects».

«Our first step is releasing the specifications and mechanical drawings. The second step is working with the community to improve them» — say the team behind Opencompute project.