Some people will tell you that Google and Facebook and Amazon are beside the point.

They acknowledge that Google designs its own computer servers and other hardware for the massive data centers powering its web empire. They admit that Facebook does much the same thing, contracting with manufacturers in Asia to build its custom hardware. And they realize that most of the big web players – from Google, Facebook, and Amazon to Twitter and Yahoo – build all sorts of custom software platforms for juggling unprecedented amounts of online data. But they say the big web players aren't like other companies, that this custom engineering work doesn't mean that much for the rest of the world.

And they couldn't be more wrong.

In the world of business tech, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other web giants have become the bellwethers. They build stuff to solve problems no one else has ever faced, and then that stuff trickles down to everyone else. This is true of software, with the big web players spawning widely used open source platforms such as Hadoop. But it's also true of hardware.

No, the average business isn't designing its own servers. But many companies are now borrowing more than a few hardware ideas from the likes of Google and Facebook as they seek to significantly reduce the cost of running a data center. A prime example is Goldman Sachs, the big-name New York financial house. Its network of data centers isn't nearly as large as the networks run by Google and Facebook, but it still faces many of the same problems – and it can benefit from many of the same solutions.

"Finance is a very technology-dependent business," says Don Duet, a global co-chief operating officer in Goldman's technology division. "We have a substantial infrastructure footprint, and over the past four or five years, we've been moving into a scale-out-type model that's very similar to the big web firms.

"We spend a lot of time with the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. We find that a lot of our computational problems are consistent [with theirs] and that a lot of the ways we think about building out our architecture are very similar to the large scale web companies."

Like another big-name financial house – Fidelity – Goldman is part of the Open Compute project, Facebook's effort to shake up the hardware industry. With Open Compute, Facebook is not only sharing its low-cost server designs with the rest of the world. It's working with a wide range of other companies to open up the world's hardware supply chain, so that anyone can more easily purchase the gear they need.

Facebook contracts with "original design manufacturers" in Asia to build its custom servers. This means it's cutting out the middlemen. These same ODMs build servers for big-name hardware sellers like Dell and HP. But going straight to the ODMs is rather complicated, and part of the aim of the Open Compute project is to facilitate such relationships.

According to Duet, Goldman is already buying some of its gear straight from ODMs or similar companies, and he says this is indicative of a larger trend. "We have a number different people we work with today, from the 'majors' you'd expect to a lot of the other players, including a number of the 'white label' companies," he says.

Four or five years ago, Goldman built a large server farm for doing Monte Carlo simulations, a way of predicting how investments will play out, and this is when the company made the move to the ODMs, or "white label" companies. It needed a large number of servers to work in concert on a single task, but it didn't need a lot of the bells and whistles that typical come with a server. In other words, it needed servers a lot like the ones that Facebook or Amazon uses.

Leaning on the ODMs, Duet says, is "a lot more common than you might think," and others indicate much the same thing. Diane Bryant – who heads Intel's data center business – recently told us that eight server makers now account of 75 percent of its server chip sales. Just four years ago, that 75 percent was divided among a mere three names: HP, Dell, and IBM.

One of those eight is Google, which only makes servers for itself. But Bryant pointed to the rise of such ODMs as Quanta and Supermicro. Quanta, a Taiwanese outfit, builds some of the gear for Facebook and other web giants. Supermicro, an American company with a operations in Asia, keeps a relatively low profile, but it's used by a wide-range of other familiar net names, including Dropbox.

Duet also points out that the big-name server makers are working to change their businesses so that they can compete with this new challenge from the ODMs. Dell, for instance, now operates a unit called Dell Data Center Services that seeks to provide custom gear for large operations.

>'We find that a lot of our computational problems are consistent with the large scale web companies and that a lot of the ways we think about building out our architecture are very similar.' Don Duet

Goldman has not adopted Facebook's custom server designs. They don't fit – physically – into its existing infrastructure. But working in tandem with Goldman and others, AMD and Intel have released specs for a similar servers that use a more traditional shape, and Duet says Goldman intends to adopt these designs when they're ready.

Duet says it hopes to have these servers up and running within six months. "We want to get the point where we have machines that inherit some of the properties of the original Facebook designs, but actually work in more classic data centers."

The company may purchase from traditional "original equipment manufacturers" such as Dell and HP, Duet says, but it may also use the ODMs and other companies that operate outside the traditional channels. A company called Synnex, for instance, is trying to streamline the path to the ODMs, and some of the Asian ODMs, such as Quanta and Wistron, have now opened operations here in the US.

In another echo of the big web players, Goldman has also made the move to "containerized" data centers. About eight years ago, Google started piecing its data centers together using shipping containers packed with servers and other gear. The idea was to improve the efficiency of data center construction by creating a standard building block. These data center containers – or "pods" or "modules" – not only made it easier to build data centers but expand them as well, and now, Goldman is taking much the same path with data center modules built by a company called IO.

Goldman is installing these modules in its own data centers, but its also using them in facilities it shares with other companies. "It lets us be much more nimble," Duet says.

No, other companies aren't like Google or Facebook. Except that they are.