Facebook announced that it has saved more than $1 billion using open servers in the past three years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Calif. today in front of a packed crowd.
In addition to saving more than $1 billion in operating costs at its data centers, Facebook's open servers have also contributed to an impressive decrease in the company's carbon footprint.
"In just the last year we've saved the equivalent amount of energy of 40,000 homes in a year, and saved the amount of emissions equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year," Zuckerberg boasted at the summit.
For the past three years, Facebook has been working tirelessly with the Open Compute Project to design its own servers. Facebook also focused on improving the efficiency of its data centers in hopes of spreading that cost-saving technology to other companies.
"When you're the first company to design something, sometimes there's an advantage to keeping it proprietary and secret," Zuckerberg said. "For us it was much better to collaborate with the community and...deliver something that could blow past what anyone else had done."
Part of Zuckerberg's mission is to spread the use of open servers around the tech industry and to promote energy-saving machines in data centers. Servers powered by energy-efficient processors like those from ARM, not only save companies money, but also cut down on pollution. Zuckerberg's willingness to share Facebook's new server technology with other companies is reminiscent of Linux's open source software project.
The idea of sharing technologies is very democratic and may seem counterintuitive, but open source proponents claim that doing so allows technologies to improve faster. Facebook will also undoubtedly make money and expand its reach by sharing its new open server technology.
"If we can bring those kinds of savings and those kinds of efficiencies to other companies as well, that's great, and we're really proud of that," Zuckerberg said.
Facebook's new servers will be in heavy competition with Intel's big, powerful servers, but for certain companies, Facebook's open servers might be a better fit. Although Intel's servers are considered the industry standard, the company faces stiff competition from ARM's low-energy consuming processors. Intel recently introduced its own energy-efficient processors, in hopes of beating Google and Facebook to the punch.
However, it seems that no matter what Intel does, the PC market is shrinking and microservers and open server projects like Facebook's are gaining momentum in the tech industry. It remains unclear what the lasting implications of open server technology will be, but one thing is certain: with heavy weights like Facebook and Microsoft jumping on the band wagon, efficient and low-cost open servers might become very popular.
