Facebook Makes Millions From its Open Compute Project
Facebook founded the Open Compute Project back in October of 2011. The company has adhered to the program over the last couple of years and has saved over $2 million throughout the last three years. The company’s announcement of this massive savings was made this past week at the Silicon Valley Open Compute Summit Conference.
The Foundation of Facebook’s Open Compute Project
Facebook’s Open Compute Project started out as an initiative to decrease Facebook’s overhead expenses in terms of 
hardware. The company’s Vice President of Engineering, Jay Parikh, has closely monitored the project’s results and stated that he has tracked an excess of $2 billion that has been saved through network, data center and software optimizations. Even for an organization as large as Google, $2 billion in savings is significant.
Those who have been compliant with the Open Compute Project have amassed enough savings in energy costs to provide enough power for 80,000 homes to stay functional for an entire year. All in all, carbon emissions have decreased by around 400,000 metric tons. This figure equates to taking nearly 100,000 vehicles being taken off of the roads for a full year. All of these reductions can be attributed to Facebook Open Compute project related measures.
The Impact of the Open Compute Project
The project also strives to make a more efficient use of the energy consumed to power storage, server and data centers, including their hardware designs. Facebook has actually designed highly efficient electrical and mechanical systems along with a handful of server designs for the Open Compute Project. In a way, the Open Compute Project is 
similar to the open source software movement as an altruistic and collaborative effort.
Facebook recently made a series of announcements relating to the project. Executives have detailed the Yosemite SoC compute server that the company has been devising with engineers at Intel. It aims to sharply ramp up speed while decreasing the costs created by Facebook traffic. It was also recently announced that the company had proposed a spec for Wedge, its top of the rack network switch.
The company is working with Broadcom and Accton on a product similar to Wedge for the Open Compute Project. Other top backers include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Canonical.
