In just a few years, social media behemoth Facebook managed to build up a $100 billion IPO valuation, and all the credit goes to the 800 million registered accounts on the network – 800 million users that the company’s IT infrastructure has to support. Facebook’s engineers got cracking, laying out the blueprints for a new breed of data center equipment that focuses on efficiency rather than hype, and a year later the Open Compute initiative is stepping into high gear.

Open Compute is the initiative set up by the company to share the designs of its cost-efficient boxes and hardware with the rest of the community. And the amount of interest the project managed to attract is hardly surprising: Facebook, the prime user of its technology, is touting an impressive 38 percent reduction in power consumption and a 24 slash to overheads.

“With Open Compute, Facebook, has become the ‘tail wagging the dog,’ causing hardware manufacturers to focus more on providing value for business customers than on building faster machines than the competition,” said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.  “In time, this will enable CIOs to buy computers without all of the features of more expensive systems, he said.”

A recent decision by Hewlett-Packard, the manufacturer that assembles Facebook’s metal, seems to confirm this observation.  HP director of marketing Glenn Keels said that his company is not unwilling to cash in on the potential demand for the Coyote and Coyote 2, saying that customers falling under specific criteria are eligible to order the servers. It will probably be a while until they hit general availability though, if at all, but there’s a strong chance according to Valdes.