Facebook has just confirmed that it is, in fact, building a new, fancy, open-source data center in Altoona, Iowa.

All we know about Iowa, we learned from the classic musical State Fair — it’s full of honest, salt-of-the-earth types who have spring fever although it isn’t even spring and who really want them some blue ribbons for jam.

But Iowa Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds said in a statement that the state is also home to a “list of world-renowned tech companies,” and Governor Terry Branstad called Iowa “a destination for tech companies — from major data center operations like Facebook’s to the innovative startups we continue to see popping up around our state.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) board approved an $18 million tax break for Facebook, provided the company invests almost $300 million in the data center and creates at least 31 jobs in the area. There are also specific financial kickbacks from the city of Altoona that were not disclosed in today’s announcements.

Here’s a look at a rendering of the Iowa facility:

The Facebook-led Open Compute Project open-sources its wildly efficient server and data center designs so the broader community of technologists, manufacturers, and software companies can use them and improve on them. Some of Facebook’s OCP data centers also report their efficiency metrics in real time.

“Altoona will be our fourth owned and operated data center, and our third in the United States,” wrote Facebook infrastructure chief Jay Parikh today in a company blog post.

“The facility will feature the same Open Compute Project server designs and innovative outdoor-air cooling system that our others do, but it will also incorporate evolutionary improvements to the building design, networking architecture, and more. When complete, Altoona will be among the most advanced and energy efficient facilities of its kind.”

To get a look at how the Iowa data center will impact the Altoona environment — and a photo tour inside Facebook’s new breed of data centers — check out our in-depth coverage.

Top image: State Fair, 20th Century Fox

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Facebook is famously green on the data center side, and today, it’s introducing a new level of transparency. With two new dashboards, you’ll now be able to see the real-time impact and efficiency behind the scenes of all your Facebook activity.

Every like and comment and photo shared on Facebook has some ecological cost. The machines that process and store them use power, which still mostly comes from coal; and they need to be cooled. Facebook and the Open Compute coalition of hardware manufacturers and tech companies have made great strides in designing the most efficient machines possible for doing this job with as little negative environmental impact as possible.

In fact, Facebook has two data centers dedicated to Open Compute’s green-first designs. One is in the cooler clime of Prineville, Ore.; the other is in Forest City, NC.

Both data centers now have real-time online dashboards anyone can access (check out the Prineville dashboard and/or the Forest City dashboard for yourself — both are interesting and interactive).

On these dashboards, you can look at a visual representation of important data-center stats — the humidity, the power usage effectiveness (PUE), the water usage efficiency (WUE), and the temperature. You can also track these metrics over time throughout the past 24 hours, the past week, the past quarter, or even the past full year.

“We’re proud of our data center efficiency, and we think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like,” writes Facebook efficiency project manager Lyrica McTiernan in an Open Compute blog post today.

“We began sharing PUE for our Prineville data center at the end of Q2 2011 and released our first Prineville WUE in the summer of 2012. Now we’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day.”

For even more visual stimulation, here’s a collection of photos we took during a walking tour of Facebook’s Prineville data center. Especially interesting: How Facebook manages to keep the machines running at top efficiency without traditional air conditioning.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

LAS VEGAS – IBM just announced that it’s basing its cloud products and services on open cloud architecture.

IBM is placing its considerable heft behind OpenStack, a cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. The nonprofit Open Stack Foundation manages the product, and IBM announced it would be a big-time sponsor last April.

“It’s a vote of confidence for the maturity of the [OpenStack] technology,” said Robert Leblanc, the senior vice president of IBM Software (pictured, left), on a conference call with the press. IBM made the announcement at its Las Vegas cloud conference “PULSE,” which began Sunday and ends Friday.

The hope is that IBM’s existing customers will adopt open source-based technologies, which can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

“I’m excited to see IBM throw their considerable weight behind Open Stack,” said Deepak Advani, a general manager at IBM customer Tivoli, on the call. 

IBM is a long-time contributor to the OpenStack project, along with companies like Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, and Yahoo.

“I think the first couple years of OpenStack is really about helping people run and configure it,” said Scott Sanchez, Rackspace’s strategy lead for Open Cloud in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “But we are seeing a tremendous amount of traction,” he said.

Going forward, IBM will dedicate 500 of its developers to work on open cloud projects. IBM also announced that its Smart Cloud offering (the cloud portfolio used by 5,000 customers) will incorporate open cloud pieces. ”It brings along so many capabilities ” said Leblanc, who pointed out Smart Cloud launched before there even was an Open Stack movement.

IBM’s rebranded offering, “SmartCloud orchestrator,” is currently in beta testing. Benefits for customers include a reduction in operational costs, better integration with third party tools, and a simplification of cloud services.

Jim Smith, a managing partner for Mohr Davidow Ventures, said this is a step forward in “breaking the chains for high cost technologies.” On the conference call, he said that for large businesses and entrepreneurs, “the canvas for innovation is moving to the cloud.”

Photo illustration by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Silicon photonics!

The phrase itself smacks of the future — the Star Trek, Iron Man future of cool-sounding technobabble and powerful gadgets. But it’s actually more reality than technobabble, as Intel showed today at the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.

Intel announced at the summit it is open-sourcing its silicon photonics technology, a specific hardware innovation that would be more cost-efficient as well as faster and more reliable for transferring data.

The technology could be used to give the entire Internet a boost of bandwidth with tiny, low-power devices.

Intel describes silicon photonics generally as “a new approach to using light (photons) to move huge amounts of data at very high speeds with extremely low power over a thin optical fiber rather than using electrical signals over a copper cable.”

The hardware company has spent the past two years working on its silicon photonics designs; today, it said it has developed production-ready engineering samples.

Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky said in a blog post on the summit’s news that the technology would “enable 100 Gbps interconnects — enough bandwidth to serve multiple processor generations.

“This technology also has such low latency that we can take components that previously needed to be bound to the same motherboard and begin to spread them out within a rack.”

Intel’s prototype is a demonstration of the company’s photonic rack architecture for interconnecting compute, storage, and network resources, allowing the elements to be disaggregated in the rack and thus upgradable independent of one another — a main focus of the Open Compute Summit today. Intel will open-source its designs for enabling a photonic receptacle via OCP.

In a separate announcement, Intel reps said the silicon-based hardware “provides a distinct cost advantage over older optical technologies in addition to providing greater speed, reliability, and scalability benefits.

“Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.”

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud computing giant Rackspace has announced plans to partner up with the leading providers of open source data centers.

As a founding member of the Open Compute Project, the company’s goal is to make it cheaper and more energy efficient to power the world’s Internet.

Facebook launched the initiative in April 2011 as a pledge to share custom data center designs, and scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible.

At the fourth Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. today, executives at companies like Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace pooled together their knowledge and resources. They also announced hardware designs, new jobs, and upcoming partnerships.

Related: VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell is reporting live from the Open Compute Summit. Read her coverage here. 

“Rackspace will support those companies and organizations that share our vision for an open cloud,” said COO, Mark Roenigk. In an email statement, he stressed that the San Antonio, Tx.-based competitor to Amazon Web Services is “committed” to supporting the efforts of “like-minded companies who are dedicated to open standards.”

Roenigk delivered a keynote address at the summit and emphasized the company’s mission to support engineers who are designing more energy-efficient servers, storage, and hardware for scalable computing. The open-source hardware movement is still in its early days, so the strategy may well extend far beyond partnering with suppliers of next-generation open source data centers.

Still, the pioneers of this movement remain optimistic about Open Compute and where its partners will go next. “We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” remarked Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — This morning, Facebook and a slew of big names in cloud computing and data center hardware unleashed a whole boatload of news — new hardware designs, new jobs, and new partnerships — all around the Open Compute Project.

AMD and Intel both showed off some new hardware products. Rackspace announced it has customized its own server hardware around OCP designs — and contributed its customizations back to the project. And Fusion-io was talking about its new 3.2TB ioScale card, also an OCP product.

The Open Compute Project is the Internet and hardware industries’ attempt to make computing vastly more efficient by pooling knowledge and resources. Close competitors are actually working collaboratively to come up with a better motherboard, a better power supply. And it’s not just industry titans, either; anyone can download and modify the specs for Open Compute hardware.

Why should anyone with a day job and a social life care about this?

Two reasons: First, every time you click anything anywhere on the Internet, it takes a tiny toll on the environment — something with the impact of an ant’s footstep on a boulder. It takes electricity to power the machines that process the clicks and carry the data around the world, and most of that energy ain’t coming from wind farms.

Second, every click, every bit of data costs the companies behind web services a tiny amount of money, maybe hundredths of a cent, maybe thousandths of a cent. They’re paying to power the services, to store the data, and to employ the folks who keep the machines running.

In aggregate, those tiny costs add up to tons and tons of carbon and billions of dollars in bottom-line costs for companies like Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So by putting aside their differences and competitiveness just long enough to make better, faster, cheaper, kinder-for-the-planet servers, these companies are ensuring a better environment for all of us as well as lower operating costs (and higher profits) for themselves — something Facebook in particular can’t afford to overlook.

This open-source hardware movement is still in its early days. Today marks the start of the Project’s fourth Open Compute Summit; while the first Open Compute efforts were driven by Facebook, today’s summit is thick with IT corporations from around the world.

“We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” said Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky (pictured above and below) today in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”

And as hardware becomes more open, not unlike the world of software, where open-source is the backbone of most systems, Frankovsky and others try to look into the near future and figure out where Open Compute and its network of partners should go next.

“Where it’s all headed in my mind is about breaking up the monolith … disaggregating the system design,” he said.

What that means, he continued, is changing the way data center hardware works. Instead of moving slowly and changing out whole stacks of hardware, Frankovsky says hardware should become — and is becoming — more flexible to meet consumers’ needs, more customizable to different configurations, and more quick to adapt to innovation.

“Today, one of the biggest challenges in hardware design is trying to predict where the software’s gonna be,” said Frankovsky. “There’s an impedance mismatch between the speed at which software moves and the speed at which hardware can move.”

He said “smarter technology refreshes and upgrades” is another challenge. So for OCP, breaking up the monolith means malleable configurations for data center gear, smarter tech upgrades, faster innovation for speedier components, and above all, openness.

New OCP members announced today include players in storage, telecom, and microprocessors: SanDisk, EMC2, Fusion-io, HGST, ARM, Tilera, Calxeda, NTT Data, and Orange. Cole Crawford, a Linux Foundation advisor and former Nebula exec, has been named OCP’s COO and is its first full-time employee.

Another exciting news item is the opening of OCP’s first international chapter, OCP Asia Pacific. With partners like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, OCP already has a significant foothold in Asian markets, which are themselves hugely important hubs for hardware design and manufacturing. Interest in the region has been so strong that Frankovsky said some interested parties had taken it upon themselves to translate OCP specs into Japanese. Plus, he pointed out, “Asia’s going to have their own way to focus on their own issues,” such as earthquake tolerance and high-density physical spaces.

For Facebook’s part, the company is open-sourcing cold-storage versions of OpenVault and OpenStack, which are in use in its new-ish Sub-Zero cold storage facility, as well as Dragonstone, a new database server for its Swedish data center featuring high availability with dual motherboards and power supplies.

For more specifics, check out the OCP’s blog post on today’s announcements, and stay tuned for more news from the Summit.

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This was Facebook’s year. The social network made its debut on the public market, and it crossed the unprecedented one-billion-users mark. For many of the social network’s earliest employees, it was the stuff dreams are made of.

But so much happened to make those two dreams into realities. And the realities weren’t always all they were cracked up to be: The initial public offering got off to a painful start. In fact, stock prices for Facebook still haven’t recovered. And a billion users means a billion opportunities for bullying, privacy mishaps, and user data breaches.

Still, all highs and lows being considered, Facebook came into its own this year in a way no one in the world could ignore. Here are the biggest moments of Facebook’s 2012.

10. Zuck’s first patent

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got his first-ever patent this year. Some found it ironic that the patent dealt with online privacy. But since Facebook customers first began expressing growing concerns with how the network displays and handles user data, the company has viewed privacy in a much more serious light. And a few international lawsuits and investigations didn’t slow down that quest, either.

The story: “Patent #8,225,376 limits what users reveal online by implementing a privacy policy on their status updates and profile information … dynamically generating a view of a user’s profile page that is compliant with the user’s stated privacy preferences. … My friend gets all my information; my business contact only gets some.”

9. Facebook’s war with Google over data-center design

Facebook fired up its Open Compute Project a while ago. Its goal: to open-source the specs and designs for wildly innovative and efficient data centers, making the planet greener and lowering costs for large-scale Internet companies. In 2012, Facebook got a bunch of companies to sign on to the project, with one major exception: Google.

The story: “‘The benefits of sharing so far outweigh the benefits of keeping it all closed,’ said Facebook exec Frank Frankovsky. Of Google’s ‘competitive advantage’ argument, he added, ‘I have trouble getting myself in the mindset of thinking the infrastructure is a strategic advantage from a cost perspective. It’s really more about serving the end users — that’s what differentiates a business.’”

8. The GLAAD Award

After a few years of constant crusading for LGBT issues, especially antigay bullying by and toward teens and young people, Facebook got a huge vote of approval: a prestigious award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). At a star-studded event, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg both sent a video message of support from Facebook to the LGBT community at large.

The story: “‘After violent antigay images and comments were posted on a memorial page for LGBT youth, Facebook worked with GLAAD to monitor the highly visible page and launched, in conjunction with several LGBT organizations, the Network of Support,’ a Facebook rep said.”

7. A big mobile mistake?

After months of leading the charge in campaign for the mobile web, Facebook saw its leadership do an abrupt about-face. At a September event, Zuckerberg told a large audience, “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.” But it reversed positions in a later, private chat.

The story: “Doug Purdy, the social network’s director of developer products, said HTML5 work at Facebook isn’t going away. ‘I have an entire team of folks that are focused on HTML5,’ said Purdy. ‘And [mobile browser standards project] Ringmark continues to be important to us; we have a team of people working on that.’”

6. Timeline launches to the world

Zuck introduced Timeline to the world back in 2011, and we got up close and personal with Timeline’s design mastermind just a month later. So when the new look and features of Facebook personal profiles finally rolled out to the world in January of this year, we were more than ready to share the good news and great design with everyone.

The story: “‘We think that people are really going to like these,’ said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. ‘We wanted to design a place that you’re proud to call your home. It’s a completely new aesthetic for Facebook.’ This ‘new aesthetic’ is probably the biggest change you’ll note when you start using Timeline.”

5. Real friends, real Gifts

Facebook acquired gift-giving startup Karma in May, and it took the company just a few more months to roll out its own, fully integrated version of the service. Facebook Gifts was the social network’s way to let you give real gifts — wine, toys, cookies, even Uber car rides — to the ones you care about most. Not just sweet but also savvy, Gifts should be great for Facebook’s bottom line. And the service rolled out to all U.S. users just in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

The story: “‘We think gifting is really a form of communication,” said Gifts creator and Karma founder Lee Linden. ‘We think people want to give gifts the moment they think of someone … and it may not always be convenient to pull our your purse or wallet and find your credit card right now.’”

4. Facebook Actions take over the web

With Actions, Facebook began its long-promise invasion of the web. The company has a vision that its buttons and social graph and commenting system — its very architecture — will someday soon be present on every website and mobile app imaginable. That your bank will use Facebook for your logins; that your actions and interactions on every website will find their way back to your Timeline — if you want them to. And in January, that invasion began in earnest.

The story: “Ideally, said Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen at tonight’s event, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a “Like” button or automating shares from that app to your Facebook wall — and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context.”

3. Instagram

Zuck & Co. bought a billion dollars’ worth (more or less) of hipster-ized photos with the surprising purchase of Instagram in April. As Facebook continued on its march toward total global domination and Internet ubiquity, it saw a couple things in this upstart mobile company. First, an emphasis on capturing and sharing images quickly and well that Facebook couldn’t duplicate. Second, a devoted (and huge) following of iPhone app fans. Both the users and the tech made this buy a one-of-a-kind for Facebook.

The story: “Instagram cofounder and CEO Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat when the Android app launched, ‘This release brings us closer to the idea that we can help every person on earth share their lives and discover the world through a series of beautiful images.’ Every person on Earth — did you notice that choice of wording? Can you think of any other apps aiming for a userbase of every person on earth? ‘Providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook, and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together,’ said Zuckerberg.”

2. One bill-i-on.

One billion users — not just registered users, but monthly active users. Aside from Google web search, we can’t think of a single web application that’s reached that mark. The truly interesting part: With Facebook’s focus on the developing world and feature phone access, the first billion is just the beginning.

The story: “‘Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling, and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,’ Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. ‘I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world, too.’”

1. IPO

The shares were priced — conservatively, almost everyone in the Valley thought — at $38. The night before the initial public offering, Facebook employees celebrated at the HQ with a hackathon. On IPO day, Zuck rang the NASDAQ opening bell with a look of pride and elation on his face. But the same day, the company got slapped with a privacy lawsuit. Amid technical snafus from NASDAQ, the stock started to slide, taking other tech stocks with it.

Faceboook stock dipped as low as $17 in its tumultuous first months on the market, although it started clawing back some of those losses this fall, and it’s now trading at about $27 (as of this writing).  The most highly anticipated IPO of the decade left investors and onlookers — even Zuckerberg himself — disappointed, while the faithful (or optimistic) must wait and hope.

The story: “Analysts who had previously been bullish on Facebook are surprised. Early investors are disappointed. And social media enthusiasts are at least somewhat shocked. ‘I think it is a good long-term investment,’ said Mark Siegel, managing partner at Menlo Ventures. ‘The nature of the product itself makes it difficult to be displaced … I think it’s that kind of a core, bellwether company in a tech sector. It’s gotten there remarkably fast, but it’s there.’”

FB data by YCharts

Facebook’s Open Compute Project, a huge effort to create and promote open-source hardware, is hosting its first-ever hardware hackathon.

The hackathon will take place next month in Santa Clara, Calif., at the OCP’s Open Compute Summit. The hackathon’s goal is to create a set of open-source computer hardware building blocks — kind of like Lego for computing. These blocks would eventually be applied to real-world use cases in large data centers in ways that would boost energy efficiency, make repairs simpler, and reduce overall data center costs.

Hackathon participants will be limited to just 100 people, and hardware hackers will spend between 6 and 10 hours working on the project during the two-day conference. Hackers will work in teams and will present their results at the end of the Summit.

The hackathon is a joint project between the OCP and Upverter, a DEMO-launched open-source hardware startup we’ve been keeping tabs on since it launched back in September 2011. Upverter founder Zac Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackers in the upcoming event will be using Upverter’s software tools for the hackathon. Upverter will also be giving participants plenty of reference materials, tutorials, and one-on-one guidance throughout the event.

The Open Compute Summit will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center on January 16 and 17, 2012. You can register now for the hackathon and the Summit. The ideation phase — which Upverter will also help with — starts as soon as you register.

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

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Facebook has spilled a few beans just now about its homebrewed data center cooling system, with special tweaks to operating in tax advantaged, weather disadvantaged areas.

Facebook’s Prineville, Ore., data center is its flagship for open-source hardware. As part of its ongoing Open Compute Project, Facebook has been very open on how it keeps its servers cool with a system that only uses outdoor air to ventilate the machines — no air conditioning. The servers there run at a higher-than-normal temperature, but with little or no negative impact on efficiency and hardware lifespans.

However, the same approach wasn’t as feasible for the social network’s data center in Forest City, North Carolina, where each summer the only thing higher than the temperature is the humidity.

“When we started looking at Forest City, the bin weather data suggested that refrigeration might not be required, but ASHRAE 50-year design weather maximums suggested otherwise,” writes Facebook mechanical engineer Dan Lee today on the company blog.

“To try to make the free cooling system work in Forest City, we expanded the server environmental conditions on the high end. Because dry bulb temperatures are warmer in western North Carolina than they are in central Oregon, we set the upper end of the server inlet temperature range at 85°F, instead of at 80°F. And because of the higher humidity in North Carolina, we expanded the relative humidity (RH) maximum from 65 percent RH to 90 percent RH.”

Thanks to climate change and what have you, North Carolina experienced record highs this year, with temperatures peaking at and even exceeding 100°F. But the new system held up just fine, Lee said.

“Despite the record-breaking heat, we didn’t run the DX coils at all this past summer. … When the record hot days occurred, relative humidity was low, allowing the misting system to provide all the needed cooling.”

Amazingly enough, the Forest City data center ended up being slightly more energy-efficient for the summer months of 2012.

For those of you who are fascinated by the subject, the Open Compute Summit is coming up in January and will be held in Santa Clara, Calif.

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

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For the past year, Facebook has been leading a charge to open-source the world of servers and data centers, with the end goal being the cleanest, most energy-efficient Internet we humans can dream up.

And for the past year, we and many others have wondered why Google isn’t participating in this charge — or leading a similar one of its own.

Why, we wondered, was Google refusing to participate in Open Compute, the Facebook-led coalition of major tech companies that have open-sourced their hardware for the greater good (and, it must be added, for some pretty big PR and recruiting brownie points, as well)? It seemed like an obvious fit with Google’s “don’t be evil” credo.

At Google I/O last month, we finally got an answer to this persistent question. We had some time for a long chat with Urs Hölzle, one of Google’s first 10 employees and the current chief of all things infrastructure-related at the sprawling software giant. The first part of that talk centered on Google’s latest cloud offerings, but our talk soon drifted toward hardware, data centers, and the awkward subject of Open Compute.

“Open Compute is a little bit tricky,” Hölzle began, stating the obvious. “If you can figure out how to make things work at scale and at good cost, that’s a competitive advantage.” Of Google’s own infrastructure, he said, “Thousands of years of engineering work has gone into the system to make it work.”

In other words, Google’s data centers are part of its long-cultivated goldmine, and it’s not letting Facebook peek inside. Google actually started harping on the concept of data center efficiency years ago. It joined up with Intel (now an Open Compute partner) and a few others in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in 2007, and it held a summit on the subject in 2009 and again in 2011.

We asked a question Facebook execs had brought up earlier: Couldn’t Google simply share parts of its secret sauce without giving away the whole recipe?

“This isn’t an all or nothing approach,” said Facebook engineering VP Mike Schroepfer in a meeting at his company’s Menlo Park campus. It should be noted that even in Facebook’s “open-source” data center in Prineville, Ore., there are still servers with proprietary configurations and hardware. Still, Facebook is quite open about the other half of the hardware it uses.

“It’s disappointing when people don’t participate when they can selectively share with the community,” Schroepfer said pointedly.

Hölzle’s response is somewhere between cynical and stone-cold realistic, acknowledging that the competition between these two titans is, at every level and with every product, growing more strenuous all the time.

“In an ideal world, I would love to do that,” said Hölzle of Facebook’s piecemeal approach to open-sourcing its own servers. “We’ve selectively tried to share as much as possible. We have tons of contributions to Linux and open source [software] projects… But hardware is more difficult.”

Hölzle said there are two main reasons Google can’t or won’t open-source its server hardware. The first is that relatively little of each design is persistent through multiple generations; he describes it as ephemeral rather than iterative.

“The other thing is, the problems we’ve solved, very few other people need to solve those problems,” he said. “[The average company is] not going to experience the problems that we’ve solved. The people who will are going to be the Microsofts, the Amazons, and it’s not to our advantage to share that information with them.”

However, other companies could make the same argument. Rackspace, for example, lives and dies by its data centers, their cost-efficiency, and their uptime. Yet it is still choosing to participate in Open Compute. The same thing goes for Salesforce and Alibaba, also Open Compute partners.

But the Googler maintains his position: From a business perspective, it just doesn’t make sense. “There is conflict. If someone like Rackspace contributed their best ideas, then their competitor could use that idea and replicate it,” he said.

But isn’t that the point? To share ideas, collaborate on designs, and ultimately create the perfect spec for the perfectly efficient server — one that everyone could use and that would give enormous environmental benefit to a carbon-overloaded planet?

Ultimately, the key word in Hölzle’s statement is competitor. Facebook pitted itself against Google the day its ad sales started challenging those of the search Goliath. The struggle escalated as we users started spending more and more time on Facebook — more time than we spend in Gmail or Google web search.

In the end, as “evil” as Google’s non-participation in Open Compute might seem from the outside, any expectation that it would join in is naïve at best.

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When Facebook decided to open-source the hardware that makes its data centers some of the most energy-efficient and innovative in the tech industry, others tech giants were eager to join in and open-source their Internet hardware as well. But not the biggest do-gooder, greenster, data center magnate of them all: Google.

The goal was to drastically and rapidly improve energy efficiency in data centers. This coalition of web and hardware giants is known as the Open Compute Project, and so far, only one name in mainstream tech is still glaringly absent from its membership roster.

While Facebook and Google have a historically tense relationship over business matters large and small, no one involved in Open Compute can put a finger on exactly why Google refuses to get involved. After all, the project fits right in with Google’s “do no evil” ethos and campaigns for more ecologically friendly data centers.

And while Google has previously hinted that energy efficiency is part of its competitive advantage, many other companies that could say the same thing have still wholeheartedly devoted their time and intellectual property to Open Compute.

So what’s the hang-up with Google?

Facebook’s first open-source hardware plan, drawn on a napkin

VentureBeat has reached out to Google several times over the past year; until last week, no one has been able to speak directly about Google’s data center innovations or its official stance on the Open Compute project.

When we finally got the chance to sit down with Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure czar, he confirmed what third parties have long been telling us: Google won’t play ball because it thinks its hardware constitutes a competitive advantage. (We’ll be publishing Hölzle’s fuller thoughts on the subject tomorrow morning.)

In a recent conversation at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, hardware design director Frank Frankovsky, the guru behind much of Facebook’s Open Compute work, highlighted just how many companies outside Facebook have piled onto the Open Compute bandwagon.

“There have been a number of new contributions,” he said. “An example would be the Financial District, one of the earliest adopters of Linux. … They’ve been pretty passionate about Open Compute, and they kicked off projects with Intel and AMD [to build and customize their own hardware].”

In the past six months alone, newcomers like AMD, HP, West Digital, Fidelity, Salseforce, Applied Micto, Quanta, NTT Data, ZT Systems, Emulex, DataDirect, Tencent, and Vantage data centers have joined Open Compute, which already counts Rackspace, Intel, Salesforce, Alibaba, and many others as members.

Some companies have even turned over their own projects, such as AMD’s Roadrunner, Tencent’s Project Scorpio, and Intel’s Decathelete, to Open Compute for its incubation committee or for inclusion in the project.

“This reminds me a little bit of the Brady Bunch,” said Frankovsky. As the various projects are converged and standardized, they become more valuable for large enterprises and manufacturers as well as for the project’s members themselves.

“Open Compute might evolve into a broader focus over time,” he said. There’s a possibility that the same open-source workflow that’s being applied to this data center hardware might someday be applied to other networked devices and even mobile devices. Can you imagine, for example, how the community might work together to solve issues like cell phone battery life?

“We might spread our wings,” Frankovsky concluded, “but for now, we want to stay focused on data centers, servers, and storage.”

Open-source hardware at work in Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon

And for the companies that have so far been involved in Open Compute, the Facebook team and Open Compute partners we’ve spoken to have had nothing but positive comments on the experience — and on the project’s impact on their collective bottom line.

“The benefits of sharing so far outweight the beneifts of keeping it all closed,” said Frankovsky. Of Google’s “competitive advantage” argument, he added, “I have trouble getting myself in the mindset of thinking the infrastructure is a strategic advantage from a cost perspective. It’s really more about serving the end users — that’s what differentiates a business.”

Frankovsky and the rest of the Facebookers we talked to during this visit never mentioned Google by name, but this was the competitor clearly on their minds. From the Open Compute perspective, Google’s true competitive advantage is in its search algorithm, its web-based software, its colossal reach, and not in its racks.

When we brought up the search company directly, Frankovsky said, “We’d love to see a lot more of our peers and competitors show up for this. I know they’ve made mistakes we’re about to make. … By sharing those great successes as well as the mistakes, we could save a lot of time and effort.”

“We keep reaching out,” he said. “Sometimes they show up in listen-only mode.”

Frankovsky’s “missed connections” statement seems resigned but not angry. However, other Facebookers we’ve spoken to, including data center employees, have not been shy about expressing their frustration over Google’s recalcitrance.

“This isn’t an all or nothing approach,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s engineering VP. He said that, if it so chose, Google could open-source bits and pieces of its data center and server technology without revealing the full recipe of its secret sauce.

“It’s disappointing when people don’t participate when they can selectively share with the community,” he said. “There’s lots of room for how you run the software to create a competitive advantage.”

Ultimately, he said, he expects Open Compute’s innovations to achieve a Linux-like stature and ubiquity. “The investment of the industry in Linux caused it to be superior to [Sun Microsystems'] Solaris over time,” he said. “It’s hard to bet against a large collective of people applying all their IP in a project.”

Schroepfer, who ran Firefox development for many years while working for Mozilla, has made his career in open-source and said that open source has become “the de facto way you do software.” But, he added, it’s been harder to get even seasoned open-source advocates like Google onboard when it comes to hardware.

“[It's essential] for everyone in the industry to get as power-efficient as possible, both for their bottom line and for the planet,” he said.

And he thinks Open Compute is well on its way to accomplishing that goal. “It’s astonishing to see the quality of [Open Compute] technology in production,” he said, in reference to a visit he made to Facebook’s Prineville data center, where he was making repairs to a Freedom open-source server.

Open Compute isn’t a perfect project, and its players aren’t perfect, either. But we can’t shake the sense of disappointment that Google hasn’t yet stepped up, with all its knowledge about energy efficiency and its many years of experience in building and optimizing data centers, to participate in the project.

But this isn’t the first Facebook-led open-source project Google’s backed away from. For comparison, we bring up Ringmark and the W3C’s Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group. These Facebook-fronted efforts are intended to fix one of the worst pain points in technology — and one of the points of greatest promise — the mobile web.

But as Facebook stepped forward to lead the charge and open-source its information, Google turned its back on the project, an especially odd move given Google’s interest in the mobile ecosystem vis-à-vis Android and Chrome’s new mobile browser, not to mention Google’s historical and significant participation in the free and open-source software movement. At that time, a Google spokesperson declined to speak directly about the W3C group, instead focusing on the company’s own mobile browser and operating system work.

It’s a bit naïve, a bit “kumbaya,” to expect two titans viciously warring for revenue to come to a round table and collaborate on issues like innovative mobile tech and greener data centers. But somehow, without striking a blow, Facebook has managed to give Google a black eye. Perhaps, if only for PR purposes, it’s time for Google to get its “kumbaya” back.

Images of Facebook’s Prineville data center courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

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What do HP, Salesforce, AMD, VMWare, and Alibaba all have in common?

They’re all partners in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project, a group that aims to revolutionize computer hardware through the power of open-source collaboration.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project is having its third Summit event today, and it’s bringing together some of the best minds in the world to solve problems of data center efficiency, server design, and more.

Most of its partner companies have a stake in the issue, either because they use massive server resources, because they design and sell hardware and chips, or because they are involved in creating the software that makes all this hardware more efficient.

“The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months — has been nothing short of amazing,” wrote Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware design guru, in a blog post this morning.

Frankovsky notes that the OCP now includes HP, AMD, Tencent, Salesforce, VMware, Canonical, Vantage, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling among its members, and that HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the project’s Incubation Committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals for official OCP support.

As far as new projects are concerned, Frankovksy said OCP has accepted proposals for a vanity-free storage server called “Knox”) and two high-efficiency motherboards, code-named “Roadrunner” and “Decathlete,” designed with the specific needs of financial services companies in mind.

OCP is also merging specs with Baidu and Tencent for its Open Rack design for servers.

Finally, the OCP project is doing what most open-source projects do these days: It’s launching support services for customers to easily and comfortably get started with its Open Rack designs. The OCP Solutions Provider program will allow companies to sell and use hardware based on OCP specs.

“Companies currently pursuing Solutions Provider status include Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet, as well as new business units from Quanta and Wistron (called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively) that have been launched to sell directly to consumers,” Frankovsky concluded.

The OCP got rolling about one year ago. At that time, Facebook’s vision of open-source hardware got started because Facebook itself was having trouble scaling its servers out in a way that made business sense.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” Facebook OCP lead Amir Michae told VentureBeat in an interview last fall.

“It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community,” Michael concluded, encouraging other companies to get involved in the open-source hardware project.

Stay tuned for more coming up soon from today’s Open Compute Project Summit.

Also, if this is a story you find interesting, you should check out what Facebook is doing with Ringark, its mobile browser testing suite, and the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

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Your Facebook profile doesn’t exist on your computer or in some nebulous cloud called “the Internet.”

It’s stored deep in the brick-and-mortar walls of real-world fortresses. It comes to life as electricity flows through wires that connect tens of thousands of servers to the grid.

And for some users some of the time, it lives among the wind and scrub brush of central Oregon, where Facebook has erected its first fully functioning data center in a town called Prineville.

The still-young company leases equipment and facilities at various locations, but the Prineville center is something special. Facebook designed and built this place from the ground up. More interestingly, it’s shared its customized hardware designs and super-efficient operational specs with anyone who wants to see them.

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon poking our nose around Facebook’s Prineville data center. We’ll have a longer video tour of the place posted soon, but we wanted to share the images from the trip as soon as possible.

Enjoy the data center porn, and be sure to read up on why Facebook thought open-source hardware was so important in the first place.

The Open Compute Foundation, announced today, will allow anyone to access the designs and specifications for Facebook’s homebrewed and highly efficient data center hardware and will provide structure for the project.

To join, hardware designers and hackers need to sign an agreement on the Foundation’s site, find an aspect to work on and sign an open licensing agreement to do that work. Designs will be voted into the official project based on merit.

The goals are to make data center energy usage more efficient, to make server repairs faster and fewer and to figure out better ways to serve data at massive scale, e.g., billions of users, what is known as “human scale.”

“This is not going to be a community that’s going to write wish-lists,” said Frank Frankovsky, one of the founders of the Open Compute project at a summit in New York City this morning. “We’re publishing not only specifications but also source files.”

“When we first launched this project back in April, people thought we were crazy,” said Frankovsky.

Now, however, Facebook’s groundbreaking work in data center efficiency and server redesign will be open for all to hack on and improve. As an example, Frankovsky mentioned Facebook’s newest data center in Sweden, a hydropowered facility that he said is “our greenest yet.” That design will be open sourced, its specs published and available for anyone to manipulate and possibly enhance.

Right now, you can go to the Foundation website, login with your Facebook and Github accounts, and start checking out the components that make up Facebook’s data centers, from the motherboards to the chassis — even Facebook’s completely redesigned power supplies.

“Let’s build this together,” said Frankovsky. “If we start sharing our ideas, the pace of innovation is going to increase rapidly. … Let’s start focusing on the environment and the efficiency of this.”

Asus, Intel and AMD are involved as partners and will be publishing specs and source files, which hackers will then be allowed to modify and submit back to the project. Dell is also a major partner for the project.

Facebook’s Open Compute project has inspired the interest of the hardware hacker and open-source communities, individuals and groups that Facebook said “are passionate about making strong technical contributions to defining and delivering the most efficient server, storage and data center designs.”

Open source is a huge part of Facebook’s culture. Pretty much since its inception, the company has both used and created or contributed to open-source software projects. In a recent conversation with Facebook open-source software lead David Recordon, we talked about how open-source is simply part of Facebook’s DNA in a way that’s rare for a Silicon Valley startup.

“I think it’s pretty clear there’s no question about whether companies should be using open-source software or not,” said Recordon to VentureBeat back in August. “That was answered over the past decade. The question now is about open hardware. Many of the things that we have today for open-source software we don’t have for hardware and standards.”

Amir Michel, who heads up Facebook’s open-source hardware efforts, also told us in an interview on Facebook’s data center redesign, “A lot of the tools aren’t there yet,” said Michael. “If someone wants to make a change to one of our circuit boards, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that package. The average hacker doesn’t have that. Most of the contributions so far come from other large companies. We’re hoping to change that in the future so a guy in his garage can design a motherboard.”

Stay tuned for more news on open-source hardware as the Open Compute Foundation begins accepting projects from new contributors outside Facebook.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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It’s one thing to open-source the code for your app — that’s a simple matter of mashing a button on Github. But how do you really open-source hardware?

Think about that: Facebook committed to open-sourcing the infrastructure of its data centers through the Open Compute Project, which launched back in April. But there’s more to maintaining an open-source project than just releasing data into the wild. You also have to accept contributions from other members of the community.

So how do you accept a patch for a motherboard? Or an improvement to a power supply?

This was just one of many challenges facing Amir Michael and the rest of Facebook’s open-source hardware team as they began redesigning the company’s servers and data centers. And to be frank, it wasn’t even the most challenging problem they’ve faced so far.

How Open Compute began

Michael, a former Googler, told VentureBeat that when he first came to Facebook, “I knew a lot about servers and data centers.” Not only did he understand the architecture of a network of servers; he even had hands-on experience as a data center tech, where he often worked until his hands were raw from repairing downed machines and replacing faulty components.

At the time Michael first came on board at Facebook, he said, “The way Facebook was scaling was tremendous. We were buying servers from HP and Dell, leasing server space from Data Realty Trust.”

But Michael had an inkling that one of the most significant companies of the decade might not actually have been handling its data in the smartest, most efficient way. “I did a little analysis,” he said. “I went to NewEgg.com and put together an equivalent server, and it was about the same price, even though we were buying in these huge volumes.

“The business model didn’t make sense.”

After realizing that Facebook wasn’t doing itself any favors buying stock servers in huge quantities, Michael started investigating how the servers were cooled and powered. “I realized there was a lot of inefficiency there, too,” he said. “We looked at how to improve it. With optimizing the data center and ignoring the servers, you get some efficiencies, and you get some efficiencies by optimizing the servers and ignoring the data centers. But you get the biggest benefits if you optimize both.”

In a nutshell, that’s how the Open Compute Project was born.

At the outset, Michael and the Facebook team tried to work with their existing hardware providers. “The vendors’ responses to the changes we wanted to make were lukewarm,” Michael said. “They offered to do a bunch of other things that weren’t too useful for us. They wanted us to buy what their other customers were using, but those modified machines weren’t as extreme as the customizations we were considering.”

Redesigning the server

From that point forward, Michael, Facebook’s manager for hardware design, started tearing apart every assumption about how servers were supposed to be built.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” he said.

For example, in Facebook’s new server design, the way power is delivered to the microprocessor is entirely different. The team took out transformations and distribution mechanisms and changed the power supply itself. Even the power cords and power strips have been entirely re-engineered, and the servers themselves were designed to be built and maintained without any tools.

In fact, Michael said the serviceability of the server was one of the team’s most important innovations. “When you have tens of thousands of servers, they break on an hourly basis. The hard drives fail, the memory fails. Our data center technicians are responsible for maintaining the servers. They spend their whole day installing new cabinets, new hard drives, etc. We wanted to make their jobs as easy as possible and a lot more efficient. We didn’t require any tools to assemble the servers, and most components are two to 10 times faster for basic service functions than on an average server.”

To test out this aspect of efficiency, Facebook had a prototype build party, which goes down in our book as one of the nerdiest ways to have fun on a Saturday night. “We let a bunch of engineers build the servers, we had pizza and beer, and we had a competition to see who could build a server the fastest,” said Michael. “A data center tech got it built in eight minutes.”

Facing resistance

When Michael was done redesigning the most fundamental aspects of the server, however, he didn’t get an initial enthusiastic response from a few key audiences. Engineers at Facebook who had to do work on the servers were “skeptical,” he said, and even the new vendors were “hesitant.” Facebook’s management took some convincing, as well.

“In general, the resistance to change, getting people to accept a new architecture, was our biggest challenge,” he said. “Getting people to be open to trying something new was hard.”

That’s especially true for big hardware changes. Making radical software changes is, by contrast, cheap and easy. “With hardware,” said Michael, “you need a lab, new hires, prototypes. It requires several million dollars worth of investment. To their credit, Facebook management’s willingness to invest in this fringe project speaks to their ability to take big risks and allow for innovation to occur.”

Those big risks involved trip after trip to Taiwan to work with new manufacturers, bringing a mechanical engineer in-house, and drafting between 50 and 60 pages of specs for the new servers. “Doing design on a white board is one thing, but figuring out the details is where you can stumble, said Michael, “especially when everything you’re doing is customized and entirely new from the ground up.”

Open-sourcing hardware

Finally, the Facebook team is still trying to figure out how to make the Open Compute Project truly open source by accepting contributions from the hardware hacker community.

“A lot of the tools aren’t there yet,” said Michael. “If someone wants to make a change to one of our circuit boards, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that package. The average hacker doesn’t have that. Most of the contributions so far come from other large companies. We’re hoping to change that in the future so a guy in his garage can design a motherboard.”

Michael continued to say that with the right software, that garage hacker could be making contributions as innovative as anything coming from a lab at HP or Dell. Currently, even the software used to design hardware is prohibitively expensive. But this is code — invisible, intangible ones and zeroes — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be free.

Facebook wants to work with software vendors on free licenses for Open Compute Project contributors. The company is also considering working with other corporations and organizations (such as governments and large universities, which have similar computing needs) to create new, open-source software programs for hardware design.

Another prohibitive aspect is prototype creation. A typical prototype server might cost between five and 10 times more to build than a production server, so even garage hackers might need to get some kind of financial backing for those projects.

The philosophy of open-source at Facebook

We asked Michael if he had any ideological qualms about being an open-source guy at a proprietary software company. “As the guy who builds the infrastructure, I’m disconnected from the software that runs the site. It’s not a dilemma I experience on a daily basis,” he said.

But he continued, “It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community. If you think about our business model, it’s about providing a valuable service to our users. The infrastructure we use to do that wasn’t a key piece of the business model. Our advantage is the product, not the servers. It’s not a core piece of IP.”

Also, Michael said, “Engineers are social beings, too, and they like being able to talk about the things they’re passionate about. And when you share information, you get benefits. You get feedback from other people about better, cheaper ways to do things.

“If you look at how Facebook was built, it uses a lot of open-source software. We’ve contributed back a lot in the software world, but we haven’t contribued back to the hardware world yet. No one has. But if we do that, maybe other companies can use the same kind of infrastructure. They don’t have to waste energy, and they don’t have to go through the same development process we did.”

Sharing information with universities has been particularly fruitful, Michael told us. “They have interesting solutions, but they don’t have enough data about real-world problems. They don’t know how industries operate. So by sharing information about our workloads and configurations, we get a lot of interest from universities.”

“Then there’s the environmental impact,” he said. “If we share these best practices, we’re hoping that other people can adopt it and have an impact on the environment as well.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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