Interesting that they focus on all the infrastructure they design and build/commission themselves. They are also a big customer of my company (http://www.newisys.com/Products/products.shtml). Coincidentally, they call out Facebook at the bottom of the article, in context of the Open Compute Project. Facebook had airflow and overheating problems with their intended OCP design and our Newisys engineers helped with some design adjustments to resolve those, too. Now Facebook is buying cheap Taiwanese-made (Quanta & Compal) OCP-design servers and shipping them to us (http://sanmina.com/) for racking, systems test, and shipping to their DC in Lulea, Sweden (https://www.facebook.com/LuleaDataCenter).

So yes, these guys all do lots of tough engineering work, but it's not in isolation and not without assistance from industry veterans whose careers it has been to ensure properly functioning data centers and networks.