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Comment by itcmcgrath | Hacker News Reader

I often hear about Google's custom hardware. Are there any other large tech companies (who are not hardware companies) that build/design their own hardware to run internally?

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At Bloomberg, we design almost all of our branded hardware in-house, from the terminals (monitors/keyboards)[1] to the B-UNIT authentication devices[2]. There are also other internal datacenter hardware projects.

[1]: http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u298/winstontj/Trading/Ha... [2]: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_iHYDAo93tQY/S3m5Jd5nHOI/AAAAAAAAGY8/oB...

White bunit ;( makes me miss my days there. Always surprised they never sold them, its the best authentication device I've seen.

BTW, do you know, why Bloomberg switched from the old, more comfortable B-Units (as pictured above) to the new black ones, which dont feature a full fingerprint reader any more (instead you have to slide your finger over a smaller sensor)? The old design was way more comfortable, faster and produced less errors in my experience...

The quality of scan in the swipe sensors is actually better than the older area sensors and they also cost less and take up less space on the circuit board. Perhaps the enrollment scan you did was not as good as it could have been and you should re-enroll to capture a better fingerprint.

One of the nice things about the slide scanner is that it doesn't leave a copy of your whole fingerprint on the sensor (in oil residue).

Facebook's Open Compute Project released plans for their custom hardware: http://opencompute.org/

Back Blaze open sourced their storage server designs (commodity parts in custom cases): http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

For those who don't know, when folks talk about tech companies building their own hardware, they almost never mean that literally. The manufacturing (and often some joint design work) is farmed out to third parties like Pegatron, Compal, Quanta, Flextronics, Sanmina-SCI, Foxconn, etc). Even Google's Nexus Q, which they so proudly declared was designed & built in the USA, was still not built by Google themselves.

Although mass manufacturing is farmed out, we (Bloomberg) have a surface-mount fab in NYC for work done in-house that does not require volume.

Yeah, most major ones http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/server-world-be...

Some, like Dell, Oracle, Apple, and HP are in the hardware design business so no surprises there, others like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have such large hardware needs that a significant amount of cost can be recovered by doing so, and others such as the wall street companies have specialized needs so it makes sense for them as well.

I was asked about custom hardware in an interview once and pointed out that it was pretty straight forward to go to a PC original device manufacturer (ODM) or OEM and say "I'd like an x86 architecture box that has these features ..." and get it built. The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.

The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.

And unfortunately there's still zero public information on that side of the equation, even from the Open Compute Project. I wonder how many customers are missing out because they don't even know to ask.

Can you say more about this? There is a lot of information about infrastructure costs. Put 'operations decision maker' on your business card and folks who want to share that information with you sort of ooze out of the woodwork :-)

You can 'save' anywhere from 10 to 35 percent on the cost of your computing infrastructure with some investment in customization. This is a combined OpEx + CapEx number since you benefit both from staff costs. Example: If its easier to get a machine back into service for your staff they spend less time on it so they cost less (OpEx) if you've got a larger cabinet that is holding all your machines you don't need individual chassis for each machine so they cost less to produce (CapEx).

For folks for whom their 'data processing' infrastructure is small part of their overall costs it isn't worth it but for companies that live and die on the marginal cost of one more user it's pretty critical stuff to know.

...folks who want to share that information with you sort of ooze out of the woodwork

Yeah, that was my impression. IOW, you can't find out anything unless you're actually buying. I don't have the budget for any of this stuff; I am just curious so I've looked around the Web and found no hard numbers.

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