Facebook, the social networking giant that’s already made big waves with its open-source server plans is now taking on storage.
The company, is now building its own storage hardware to keep up with the exploding demand of its more than 840 million users, according to a Wired report. Clearly it sees demand. Facebook users put millions of their own photos and other digital paraphernalia on the site.
Frank Frankovsky, the former Dell hardware guy that who now spearheads Facebook’s data center hardware effort told Wired:
We’re taking the same approach we took with servers: Eliminate anything that’s not directly adding value. The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives. We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive — and make it more serviceable.
The company fields a state-of-the-art data center in Prineville, Ore. that many techies are studying. The underlying technology in that data center is the foundation of the Facebook-launched Open Compute Foundation. The storage designs, like those of the servers, will be “open sourced” through this foundation.
Few other details on the storage effort were forthcoming, but whatever Facebook does in data center hardware — or any technology for that matter — is bound to catch people’s attention.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user IntelFreePress
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