One unique thing that Facebook executes is something called the Open Compute Project. Facebook is obtaining the benefits of their own energy efficient servers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.” Facebook has saved more than one billion dollars from these servers! He further added “Our first step for the Open Compute Project is releasing the specifications and mechanical drawings. The second step is working with the community to improve them. Please take a look, tell us what we did wrong and join us in working together to make every data center more efficient”. In the last 3 years, it has saved energy, sufficient for 40,000 homes in a year.
Facebook adopted this Open Compute design back in April 2011 and since then it has been adopted by some famous companies like Intel, AMD, Box, IBM and Microsoft. It’s great that other major companies are following Facebook’s lead. It’s not a matter of shame to follow someone, when it’s beneficial for the environment and saves money. Facebook’s VP of Engineering Jay Paraikh said that in the last three years, Open Compute designs have made Facebook save $1.2 Billion.
This entire project is a stunning initiative specially in the modern world, where there is a burning issue of energy crisis. By sharing this energy efficient ideas, scientists and engineers can salvage much energy which can be used for other purposes. It is an amazing idea which should be adopted by more and more companies for saving energy. The average US home uses 903 kilowatt hours per month and the average price of kilowatt per hour is $0.1209. That means that Facebook saved about $52 million in energy because of the Open Compute designs. That’s amazing! These kind of efficient and successful ideas should be adopted in other fields of technology as well, for a fast and reliable access to storage and data center hardware.
