Facebook's "Open Compute" Server tested

AnandTech has tested the custom build Open Compute Servers from Facebook and did compare them to a HP DL380 G7 general purpose server. Facebook does have two system types in use. One based on a Intel motherboard for cpu intensive use and one based on a AMD motherboard with lots of RAM to run Memcached. The servers are stripped from extras like videochip and BMC and have only two USB ports and one expansion slot. The design has been open sourced at Open Compute and with a customer like Facebook there will not be a shortage of supplies other then natural disasters like Thailand flooded. Benchmarks show that those servers really are the energy savers as they are supposed to. Up to 15% maybe do not sound impressive but for a datacenter containing 1000's of servers it is quite a bit. Of course there is a large market for general purpose servers too and HP DL380 G7 is performing quite well in that market. The Open Compute servers are also in the market targeted by the 64 bit ARM serverchips from Applied Micro. It is quite possible that they will replace current AMD based Memcached servers.