James Hamilton on Open Compute Project
Facebook is a big business operating at high scale and they also have elected to invest in advanced infrastructure designs. Jonathan Heiliger and the Facebook infrastructure team have hired an excellent group of engineers over the past couple of years and are now bringing these designs to life in their new Prineville Oregon facility. I had the opportunity to visit this datacenter 6 weeks back just before it started taking production load. I had an excellent visit, got to catch up with some old friends, meet some new ones, and tour an impressive facility. I saw an unusually large number of elegant designs ranging from one of the cleanest mechanical systems I’ve come across, three phase 480VAC directly to the rack, a low voltage direct current distributed uninterruptable power supply system, all the way through to custom server designs. But, what made this trip really unusual is that I’m actually able to talk about what I saw.
In fact, more than allowing me to talk about it, Facebook has decided to release most of the technical details surrounding these designs publically. In the past, I’ve seen some super interesting but top secret facilities and I’ve seen some public but not particularly advanced data centers. To my knowledge, this is the first time an industry leading design has been documented in detail and released publically.
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