Facebook is extending the “vanity free” approach it took to server engineering to storage hardware.

The company is developing customized storage arrays that are more appropriate for Facebook-scale storage requirements than what’s currently available on the market, Facebook’s hardware-design man Frank Frankovsky told Wired.

“We’re taking the same approach we took with servers: Eliminate anything that’s not directly adding value,” Frankovsky said. “The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives.

“We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive — and make it more serviceable.”

Facebook plans to contribute whatever designs come out of the project to the Open Compute Project, the non-profit it started to create an open-source community for collaborative data center and hardware design that will work much like the open-source software movement.

The idea is to contribute designs to the Open Compute Project, making them available publicly, so others can use them and/or contribute to the designs themselves. This will ideally make the solutions that result from the designs stronger.

The company plans to release the new storage designs at the upcoming Open Compute Summit in May.

Designs of Facebook’s data center in Prinevile, Oregon, and designs of the servers and electrical and mechanical infrastructure inside were first in Open Compute’s publicly accessible repository.

The company says its optimized data center and hardware have made the facility overall extremely more efficient than it would be had the company built it traditionally, using existing designs and solutions available on the market.