How does Facebook store tons of user profile data?

Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site in the world today with up to 250,000 new users being added every day.

But ever thought How does Facebook store and retrive this massive amount of data? Well, heres the answer..
 
Facebook wants new designs for storage and other equipment that are more energy efficient. Its year-old project to create open source hardware for data centers got a major boost when a whole bunch of big players joined including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Salesforce.com, VMware and Canonical.


But there's a catch. Companies that participate have to agree to "open source" their designs and make them available for free to anyone that wants them.

Well we get a feeling that Facebook's goal here is to do for hardware what Linux did for software. That means create open source hardware where users are calling the shots, not just hardware vendors.