Every year, computing giants including Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ), Dell ( DELL), andCisco Systems ( CSCO) sell north of $100 billion in hardware. That’s the total for the basic iron—servers, storage, and networking products. Add in specialized security, data analytics systems, and related software, and the figure gets much, much larger. So you can understand the concern these companies must feel as they watchFacebook ( FB) publish more efficient equipment designs that directly threaten their business. For free.
The Dells and HPs of the world exist to sell and configure data-management gear to companies, or rent it out through cloud services. Facebook’s decision to publish its data center designs for anyone to copy could embolden others to bypass U.S. tech players and use low-cost vendors in Asia to supply and bolt together the systems they need.
“There is this massive transition taking place toward what the new data center of tomorrow will look like.” —Peter Levine
Instead of buying server racks from the usual suspects, Facebook designs its own systems and outsources the manufacturing work. In April 2011, the social networking company began publishing its hardware blueprints as part of its so-called Open Compute Project, which lets other companies piggyback on the work of its engineers. The project now sits at the heart of the data center industry’s biggest shift in more than a decade. “There is this massive transition taking place toward what the new data center of tomorrow will look like,” says Peter Levine, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re talking about hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars being shifted from the incumbents to new players coming in with Facebook-like technology.” (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)
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businessweek.com
EDIT
The full story was posted last Sunday on the Facebook thread
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