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Facebook's data center in Prineville, OR, has been one of the most energy efficient data center facilities in the world since it became operational early this year. Some of the innovative features of the electrical distribution system are DC backup and high voltage (480 VAC) distributions, which hav (...)

The second Open Compute Project Summit was a resounding success, but that just means we as a community have a lot of work ahead of us to advance the goals and benefits of open hardware. Through a series of presentations by industry luminaries and technical workshops, hundreds of participants came to (...)

This morning we announced the Open Rack specification. The open rackuses an all-encompassing design to accommodate compatible Open Compute Project chassis components, and includes the power solution as well as input and output voltage distribution. You can download the spec now fromGitHub. If you're (...)

Welcome to the new opencompute.org! This revamp focuses the site onprojects and the community. Please bear with us as we work out our kinks,but we have a new streamlined project browser with links to some projectson GitHub! Our original specifications were created in Word and convertedto PDFs, not a (...)

Facebook's Prineville, Oregon, data center, which opened in April 2011, had a Power Usage Effectiveness PUE of 1.08 for the second quarter of 2011, compared to 1.07 in the first quarter1. For the first half of the year, this means 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every Open Compute serv (...)

Many data centers sit on a lot of "cold storage" -- servers containing terabytes of user data that must be retained but is rarely accessed, because users no longer need that data. While the servers are considered cold because they are rarely utilized, their hard drives are usually spinning at full s (...)

Operating at Web scale, and doing so as efficiently as possible, is the next great challenge facing the IT industry. The Open Compute Project was formed to help us all meet that challenge; it's our hope that adopting an "open source" approach to building servers, storage, power supplies, and data ce (...)

A team of researchers including Eric Masanet at Northwestern University, Arman Shehabi at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jonathan Koomey at Stanford University wrote an article in the current issue of the refereed journal Nature Climate Change, summarizing the key factors affecting the g (...)

By Frank Frankovsky-Chairman/President, Open Compute Project A little more than a month ago, the Open Compute Project celebrated itstwo-year anniversary. When Facebookfirst launchedthe project, it was our hope that we could spark more conversation and more collaboration around the development of ef (...)