Facebook plans open source storage

Facebook reveals it is building its own storage hardware to cope with the mass of data uploaded by its 845 million users, TechWeek Europe reports.

The initiative is part of the social networking site's Open Compute Project, unveiled last year to share high-efficiency data centre hardware specifications designed by Facebook and other Open Compute partners.

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's director of technical operations, says the social network is taking the same approach it took with servers and will eliminate anything that's not directly adding value, ZDNet states.

"The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives. We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive - and make it more serviceable," explained Frankovsky.

Facebook fields a state-of-the-art data centre in Prineville, US, GigaOM says.

The underlying technology in that data centre is the foundation of Open Compute, which the project morphed into after Facebook relinquished control.