Facebook to Open DC Plans

Facebook opened up its datacenter plans! It’s a really big contribution, and it is sure to change the way that Data Centers are designed. It could also prove to be disruptive for hardware manufacturers in the server space. Gigaom covers a lot of the details.

The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.

Some of the design details seem obvious to me. Unless you are standing in front of a server, the speaker is useless. Also, the beeps can be muffled by the fans and the hundreds of other servers in the vicinity. A visual indicator of server health is far more useful.

This reminds me of the time one of the marketing managers at Novell referred to the telecom closet in a branch office as a datacenter. Even IT geeks sometimes forget the scale at which some large corporations are running at. Minute energy savings, such as the ones found by Facebook, are a nerdy (but green) topic.