Mozilla is one of the best known brands in the open source world. Its Firefox browser runs on about a quarter of the world’s PCs, but three months ago, the group crossed another important threshold. It became big enough to build its own data center, writes Wired Enterprise’s Robert McMillan.

Anytime you pay a visit to Mozilla.org, the home page of the open source Mozilla project, you’re landing on a page served by a brand new type of machine. A SeaMicro SM10000 server — a fat box about the size of an air conditioner that houses 64 Xeon processors. Mozilla has two SM10000′s in its brand new Santa Clara data center, which went online in February. One of them powers Mozilla.org, and the second powers Mozilla’s add-on website. It’s part of a strategy to move lighter web-serving loads to low-power systems, and to free up the bigger hard drive capacity, memory, and CPU power on the organization’s blade server so that they can run databases. “Our thinking was take a web server, turn it into a database server, and take the web server and move it into SeaMicro,” says Matthew Zeier, Mozilla’s director of IT operations.

Mozilla’s new $3 million Santa Clara, California, facility — a shared floor on a large facility run by wholesale data center provider Vantage — is tiny compared to the monster facilities run by the cloud giants. But it’s also a community effort. After all, this is Mozilla — an organization that wants outside volunteers to work as its system administrators, McMillan writes.

So did Mozilla go DIY?

Being the community effort that it is, when looking to build its data center, Mozilla reached out to friends in the industry, people like Internet Software Consortium Founder Paul Vixie and data center guru Dave Ohara, who connected them with other data center experts.

“It’s only recently that there’s been a larger interest in more of this collaboration and community good approach to this,” Moore says. “We’re still finding each other.” They got invited to tour some data centers. With some companies, though, there was more of a stony silence. “Though this whole process of discovery where we were reaching out to the community, we also ran into those people. We realized how many people didn’t want to talk about it,” says says Derek Moore, Mozilla’s manager of global data center operations. “There were people who simply wouldn’t want to share any information at all.” Power is the single largest operational expense for data center operators, and companies such as Facebook, Netflix and RackSpace have banded together, forming the Open Compute Project, to share power-saving techniques and server designs, in hopes that they can cut down on the competitive advantage wielded by the Googles and Amazons of the word. The Open Compute Project will host its third public get-together on Wednesday, as members try to share information and design secrets so that organizations like Mozilla can save more on power. For a small player like Mozilla, joining the Open Compute Project and opening up its data center is the natural thing to do. So Mozilla was happy to have Wired come by and take pictures of what was going on. “The ethos of Mozilla and how we started was all community based,” says Zeier. “There’s very little that we do that’s behind closed doors. So I don’t think doing a data center and talking about it was a weird thing.”

The data center is conventional, but it has a few quirks, McMillan writes. There are the SeaMicro servers. And the overhead beams are painted Firefox orange. And there’s a rack of Mac Mini computers, consumer systems that you almost never see in a data center. Mozilla runs about 500 of these $600 PCs worldwide as part of its browser test-bed.

Have your say: Is Mozilla wise to build its own data center instead of tapping the cloud?