Facebook opts for DIY servers

data centres, engineers could not find the server computers they wanted from Dell or Hewlett-Packard (HP), Bloomberg reports.

So, the social media giant decided to build its own servers.

“We weren't able to get exactly what we wanted,” Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's director of hardware design, said at a conference on data centre technology last month.

According to The Bulletin, HP, Dell and companies that sell the computers off the shelves, are losing sales in a key market, because Facebook and larger rival Google are leading a switch among Internet companies to do-it-yourself servers.

These customised machines now account for 20% of the US market for servers, which generated $31.9 billion globally last year, said Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner.

As sales of personal computers slump, and consumers shift to tablet computers such as Apple's iPad, computer makers are becoming more dependent on servers.

Dell and HP lose out when large customers such as Facebook, which are outfitting data centres with thousands of servers, shun them.

All Headline News states, however, that sales data showed HP revenue from servers increased 22.5% in the third quarter of 2010, while that of Dell rose by 25.6%. IBM registered a 9.9% hike for the same period, and Fujitsu 5.2%.