Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) first launched its Open Compute Platform in 2011 with the goal of developing and sharing commodity-based hardware and datacenter designs. The social network gave a presentation at the summit recently, and Stifel analysts have provided some of the highlights of that presentation. Facebook has certainly made some progress on its goals.
Facebook cuts data storage costs
Jay Parikh, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Infrastructure VP, reported that through their designs, they were able to cut 24% of the cost of running their datacenters. The social network’s servers in all of its datacenters are now 100% OCP compliant.
Their first cold storage facility also is now live. It consists of about 30 PBs of capacity. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is planning to take the second facility live very soon and ramp up to 150 PBs or more over the next few months. In addition, each of the company’s facilities can be scaled up to about 3 EBs of total capacity.
Facebook highlights its specs
Stifel analysts note that in its cold storage specs, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is using SMR-based 3Gbps SATA HDDs. The social network said it built the first optical disk prototype which will be used in its storage architecture. Each cabinet holds 10,000 disks and 1PB of capacity. Facebook plans for each rack to hold up to 5 PBs eventually. In addition, the social network expects to have at least 50 years of data durability in this cold storage data design. Facebook expects to see a 50% cost reduction relative to cold storage and an 80% cost reduction in consumption of energy.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) said it used netbook SSDs for “front end webserver boot applications.” The social network said it is still in the early stages of deployment. It also said that over the last three years, it has saved more than $1.2 billion on running its enterprise datacenters through the use of Open Compute solutions.
