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Data centers—how they’re designed and what hardware they run—are generally deeply guarded secrets within a corporation.

Indeed, a particularly efficient data center is considered a competitive advantage.

But secrecy isn’t an objective of Facebook’s Open Compute Project.

There are six basic server types at Facebook, but the two frontline machines are the web server and the memcache server.

The web server is the first machine you connect with when you visit Facebook.com, and it does a lot of heavy lifting and database lookups.

These boxes run Linux and Apache.

Currently, these machines uses Intel Xeon rigs running dual 2.66GHz six-core Xeon X5650s.

These boxes also have a surprisingly low amount of RAM in them: just 12GB of unregistered DDR3.

Once the web server has done your lookup, data is pulled from dual Opteron-based memcache servers running Memcached, an open-source memory-caching system.

These machines are engineered for cost-efficiency.

As such, they run dual octo-core 2GHz Opteron 6128 procs in G34 sockets.

The machines feature 72GB of DDR3/800 RAM to help feed your profile page as quickly as possible.

The next iteration of the memcache servers are expected to double with 144GB RAM.

Since neither server type performs any heavy-duty local storage functions, Facebook opted for the cheapest hard drive available— in this case, a 250GB WD Caviar Blue drive—to boot the OS and store log files.

While the machines may lack a bit in the specs department, when you gang them together, their cumulative firepower is impressive.

Facebook won’t disclose exactly how many machines it uses for running.

The amazing thing is that Facebook’s servers are only a small part of the secret sauce in the company’s new data center.

Advances in cooling, server design, and backup power make Facebook’s Pineville facility perhaps one of the most energy-efficient data centers on the planet.