Facebook’s fifth Open Compute Summit is on the horizon for January 2014, and looking at what the social networking leader has been working on over the past year provides some clues on what to expect to be in the spotlight at OCPSummit V.
In the Internet.org paper issued in September 2013, Facebook, Ericsson and Qualcomm noted that boosting datacenter efficiency is essential to bringing down costs and expanding Internet access across the globe. Offering many lessons for enterprises working to improve real-time responsiveness to compete in our information economy without breaking the bank, the paper noted that integrated efforts have the potential to increase datacenter efficiency by an astounding 100x over the next five to 10 years.
This achievement requires two key innovations outlined by Facebook. First of all, the underlying costs of delivering data need to be reduced. Secondly, we need to streamline data use by building more efficient applications. It is no coincidence that flash memory in the datacenter is playing an important role in both areas.