Managing reliability and power usage in old and new data centers is... Watch Now Today’s widely dispersed workforces can make it difficult to ... Watch Now

In the midst of the wide open spaces of farm and grazing land surrounding this central Oregon town of 9,253 has been born a new type of farm: one that produces Web services that interconnect people. And like horses, cows and sheep on the grasslands, this one also requires water, fresh air and plenty of space. The new farm, of course, is mechanical and needs electricity -- lots of electricity. That's why Facebook, the world's largest social network with close to 1 billion registered users, decided about four years ago to build its first wholly-owned data center in Prineville, about 140 miles east of Portland. The Columbia River is about 80 miles away, providing all the hydroelectric power a huge facility like this needs to stay up and running at all times.

Facebook, which is closing in on 1 billion registered users and is pounded by billions of transactions each minute, realized early on that it was going to need to build its own data centers. Its first one, located in the north central Oregon town of Prineville, about 80 miles south of the Columbia River and the Washington border, opened in May 2012 after a two-and-a-half-year construction period. It is custom-built for Facebook's purposes and uses the company's Open Compute Project architecture. Until this spring, Facebook has co-located virtually all its servers with hosting services. As part of the Open Compute Project, Facebook is publishing the specifications and mechanical designs used to construct the motherboards, power supply, server chassis as well as the server and battery cabinets for its data center. That's unprecedented enough for a company of Facebook's scale. But the social networking giant is also ...

A little over a year after Facebook launched its Open Compute Project, organizers of the unusual open-source hardware and software initiative report that it is gaining traction among a large number of companies big and small. Turns out most enterprises want to save money, power from the walls and staff time. The Open Compute Project (OCP), based on much of the Facebook data center architecture and server design schemes, aims to do precisely that. But to get any project off the ground, it takes old-fashioned selling and recruiting.