Facebook usually only enters the IT discussion in the context of corporate firewall policies, but last week things took a different turn after the internal innovations at the foundation of its digital empire hit the public domain. The contribution is the latest milestone in an effort tracing back to the dawn of hyperscale computing.

An initiative born of necessity

The rising tide of social networking adoption in the mid-2000s pushed Facebook up against the limits of traditional hardware long before the need to accommodate user-generated and other unstructured data more efficiently became a part of the enterprise discourse As a result, there was a severe lack of ready-made options in the market capable of meeting its requirements.

That forced the social networking giant’s engineers to follow in the footsteps of their peers at other pioneering Internet stalwarts such as Google and Amazon and start developing their own answers to the unique challenges at hand. But conventional equipment – and more specifically, the proprietary kind – doesn’t lend itself very well to experimentation.

Even the most basic components, like the baseboard management controllers that track the operational conditions of infrastructure, often run closed-source software that has traditionally not been accessible outside the inner circle of the manufacturer. That exaggerates the fact that enterprise-oriented vendors update their offerings far too slowly to keep up with the rapidly evolving and usually highly specific requirements of a fast-growing web giant like Facebook.

The problem snowballs down the supply chain until the technology buyer is left with a choice among specific combinations of servers, networking equipment and storage that have not been tuned to their requirements and provides little freedom to do so after the fact. That obstacle is what set Facebook on course to transform its enterprise standing from an employee distraction to a major force for change in the data center.

Taking the fight to the source

The social networking giant’s internal efforts toward more flexible hardware development entered a new phase with the formation of the Open Compute Project in April of 2011. The industry initiative aims to address the root of the challenge and change how manufacturers build their equipment, starting from the initial design process.

The Open Compute Project aggregates specifications for everything from baseband controllers to entire racks and makes the intellectual proprietary needed to mass-produce the gear available under license. That way, the pace at which improvements are rolled out is not determined by any one vendor.

Every new  design contributed to the project thus automatically meets the social networking giant’s core requirement of providing its engineers with the ability to implement changes and tweaks as needed. But that’s just one side of the coin. The other is the fact that much of the technology at the Open Compute Project comes from Facebook in the first place, which means every community-developed enhancement is an enhancement that its hardware team doesn’t have to implement on its own.

And as multiple manufacturers start mass-producing the same hardware, the stripped-down nature of Facebook’s designs – which deliberately relegate value-added features to the software layer – will focus the competition on two main areas: Lowering unit costs and reducing power consumption. Both benefit the social networking giant’s bottom line.

A double-edged sword

The Open Compute Project is a great investment for Facebook, which claims to have already saved over $2 billion from contributed designs and stands to gain much more as the initiative continues to attract supporters. But the same bare-metal designs that the firm is so expertly harnessing to reshape the market for its own needs leaves the majority of organizations lacking the talent to add the necessary software stuck with traditional gear that has the functionality built-in.

In other words, for now the cost savings that the Open Compute Project aims to realize remain as far beyond the reach of the traditional enterprise as ever. The difference is that unlike before, the industry is now actively working on changing the situation, which offers CIOs a glimmer of light at the end of the proprietary tunnel.