Facebook is saving Billions being efficient

I am getting busier and I am finding others who are covering the green data center topic well.  GigaOm’s Derrick Harris was at OCP.  I know I saw him there and he writes on Facebook’s efficiency effort saving billions.

With Open Compute, Facebook is saving billions and moving markets

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Mark Zuckerberg (hoodie) on stage with Tim O'Reilly.
SUMMARY:

Facebook might have launched the Open Compute Project to force server vendors to build higher-effiency gear, but it’s having a much greater impact than even Facebook anticipated.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jay Parikh mentioned the savings.

During on-stage appearances at this year’s Open Compute Summit, which took place earlier this week in San Jose, both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and VP of Engineering Jay Parikh highlighted the cost savings: Development of energy-efficient technologies has saved Facebook $1.2 billion over the past three years.

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Zuckerberg (hoodie) on stage with Tim O’Reilly.

Mark Zuckerberg video with Tim O'Reilly at Open Compute V

Here is the video on Youtube with Mark Zuckerberg and Tim O’Reilly.

The talk starts out with the first summit in Palo Alto.  Frank and I were chatting and we laughed about how Mark pointed out the challenge to host the first event.

The web traffic so far is only 329.  I am interested in how many others watch this video.  It is nice to see a Founder care about the environment and data centers.

Amazon's James Hamilton throws in support for the idea of Blu Ray Cold storage

Facebook showed its proof of concept Blu Ray based cold storage solution at Open Compute Summit V.

Facebook has built a prototype system for storing petabytes on Blu-ray

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SUMMARY:

During the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh shared some big statistics for the company’s cold storage efforts, including those for a protoytpe Blu-ray system capable of storing a petabyte of data today.

James Hamilton posts on the idea of optical storage.

 

Next week, Facebook will show work they have been doing in cold storage mostly driven by their massive image storage problem. At OCP Summit V an innovative low-cost archival storage hardware platform will be shown. Archival projects always catch my interest because the vast majority of the world’s data is cold, the percentage that is cold is growing quickly, and I find the purity of a nearly single dimensional engineering problem to be super interesting. Almost the only dimension of relevance in cold storage is cost. See Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud for more on this market segment and how Amazon Glacier is addressing it in the cloud.

 

This Facebook hardware project is particularly interesting in that it’s based upon an optical media rather than tape. Tape economics come from a combination of very low cost media combined with only a small number of fairly expensive drives. The tape is moved back and forth between storage slots and the drives when needed by robots. Facebook is taking the same basic approach of using robotic systems to allow a small number of drives to support a large media pool. But, rather than using tape, they are leveraging the high volume Blu-ray disk market with the volume economics driven by consumer media applications. Expect to see over a Petabyte of Blu-ray disks supplied by a Japanese media manufacturer housed in a rack built by a robotic systems supplier.

 

I’m a huge believer in leveraging consumer component volumes to produce innovative, low-cost server-side solutions. Optical is particularly interesting in this application and I’m looking forwarding to seeing more of the details behind the new storage platform. It looks like very interesting work.

Mark Zuckerberg Shows up at Open Compute Summit V

Mark Zuckerberg is the guest speaker, interviewed by Tim O’Reilly at Open Compute Summit V.  For the green data center crowd, Mark mentions the importance of data centers, energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact.

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You’ll be able to watch the stream when it is archived.

  1. Open Compute Project @OpenComputePrj

    .@facebook's carbon savings in 1 year is the equivalent of taking 50,000 cars off the road for 1 year -Mark Zuckerberg at

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  2. Open Compute Project @OpenComputePrj

    Since adopting OCP designs in 2011, Facebook has saved enough energy to power 40,000 homes for 1 whole year -Mark Zuckerberg at

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  3. Quentin Hardy @qhardy

    And...here's Mark Zuckerberg! Showing the flag for open source cloud computing.

    Retweeted by Open Compute Project

Facebook predicts possibility Princeton will disappear

Sometimes the best response to a silly idea is to make fun of it in response.  Facebook posts its response to Princeton’s paper that Facebook will have 80% users.

Debunking Princeton

January 23, 2014 at 2:57pm

Like many of you, we were intrigued by a recent article by Princeton researchers predicting the imminent demise of Facebook. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends. Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this "Princeton University" - and you won't believe what we found!

Facebook pokes fun that simply because there is a correlation graph it can explained by causation.

In keeping with the scientific principle "correlation equals causation," our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend:

 

To bring up data outside Facebook, Google Trends is used.

 

Sadly, this spells bad news for this Princeton entity, whose Google Trends search scores have been declining for the last several years:

 

 

This trend suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all, agreeing with the previous graph of scholarly scholarliness. Based on our robust scientific analysis, future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth.