Every year, computing giants including Hewlett-Packard
(HPQ), Dell (DELL), and Cisco Systems (CSCO) sell north of $100 billion in
hardware. That’s the total for the basic iron—servers, storage, and networking
products. Add in specialized security, data analytics systems, and related
software, and the figure gets much, much larger. So you can understand the
concern these companies must feel as they watch Facebook (FB) publish more
efficient equipment designs that directly threaten their business. For free.
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The heart of Facebook’s experiment lies just south of the
Arctic Circle, in the Swedish town of Luleå. In the middle of a forest at the
edge of town, the company in June opened its latest megasized data center, a
giant building that comprises thousands of rectangular metal panels and looks
like a wayward spaceship.