Article submitted by My Systems Journal.
The world’s computing hardware industry is estimated at more than $100 billion a year. Major manufacturers of servers, networking gear and storage equipment includes Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. More and more Asian manufacturers are entering the market place and new free technologies introduced by Facebook are threatening the existence of major industry players.
In April 2011, Facebook started a new blueprint for its hardware known as the Open Compute Project. It allowed outsiders to join its engineers to build a new data center of tomorrow. An experimental data center is located just outside the Arctic Circle in Luléa, Sweden. Facebook claim the building is most energy efficient mega data center ever built in the world. It uses two-thirds less energy than a typical data center to process data and to cool the entire facility including servers. It takes frigid air from outside to cool servers and vents out hot air. Additionally, it slimmed down most of the servers getting rid of outer covers exposing motherboards to arctic air for efficient cooling. The center can handle 350 million photographs, 10 billion massages and another 4.5 billion similar things a day. The project has gotten the attention of computing behemoths.