A Rare Tour Of Facebook's Hardware Labs And The Amazing Stuff It Builds There

People share more than 4.75 billion things every day on Facebook like status updates, wall posts, photos, videos and comments, Facebook says. They also "Like" more than 4.5 billion things daily and send more than 10 billion messages.

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It requires a mind-boggling huge technical infrastructure to deliver all of that - hundreds of thousands of servers, hard drives, and so on.

A few years ago, Facebook started building its own hardware to come up with ways to make these things cost less, use fewer parts and less electricity, yet perform better than products offered by typical enterprise tech companies like IBM, HP, Dell, and Cisco.

Google and Amazon design their own hardware too, but those companies are secretive about their creations. Facebook not only talks about its hardware, it gives these designs away for free, a concept called "open source hardware."

It wants people to use its designs and contribute their own ideas. About two years ago, it launched a project called the Open Compute Project to take charge of its open source hardware and there's been an upwelling of interest for OCP all over the world. Anyone can grab a design, fine-tune it and send it to OCP-certified contract manufacturers.

Ultimately this project could change how all enterprise hardware is designed and bought, upending a massive market that currently generates more than $100 billion a year.

We previously showed you about a dozen-game changing hardware products that OCP has already produced.

On a recent visit to Facebook, we were given a rare tour of the Facebook hardware labs, a mechanical engineer's dream playground where much of this stuff gets invented.