Large-scale datacenters consume megawatts in power and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to equip. Reducing the energy and cost footprint of servers can therefore have substantial impact.
Web, Grid, and Cloud Servers in practical can be hard to optimize, since they are expected to operate under a wide range of workloads. For its first datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, Facebook set out to significantly improve its power efficiency, cost, reliability, serviceability, and environmental footprint. To this end, many dimensions of the datacenter and servers were redesigned, using a holistic approach.