If you're a hardware nerd who loves fiddling with data centre gear, ripping out extraneous fluff, and generally cutting the cost of your infrastructure, then the lab is a wonderful place where your dreams are manufactured.If you're an executive from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, EMC or NetApp, the lab is likely to instill a sense of cold, clammy fear, for in this lab a small team of diligent Facebook employees are working to make servers and storage arrays –and now networking switches – which undercut your own products.Meanwhile, if you represent Asian component manufacturers like Quanta and Foxconn and Wiwynn, you're likely to relish a trip to the lab, as it is here that Facebook designs its Open Compute gear, the designs of which it eventually makes available to the wider community. When these designs are published, the Asian companies are usually the ones selling the designs – at the cost of the profits of HP, Dell, Lenovo, and so on.

Obviously, El Reg had to take a tour and so earlier this month we took the Caltrain down to the social network's headquarters to ask Facebook some questions, the first of which was: what business does a social network have designing and building its own data centre hardware?Though Facebook may seem like a trivial app in itself, the scale at which it operates – over a billion users, tens upon tens of petabytes of storage, three data centres around the world (and one in construction) each containing (El Reg estimates) hundreds of thousands of servers – means that it has had to rethink how it buys and consumes hardware to keep costs down.The main insight the social network has had is that its workloads can fit into about five different types, and therefore it only needs to have five different server variants across its mammoth fleet.These SKUs tend to be limited by a single bottleneck, with RAM or flash capacities the stumbling point for database servers, HDD capacity for photo servers, CPU speed for Hadoop gear, and so on.The primary driver for evolution in our hardware SKUs is the primary component, explains Facebook's director of infrastructure Jason Taylor.

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