Google and Facebook are two of the largest web companies out there, and as such they discovered that they can be much more efficient with the way they manage their data centers.   A very large portion of Facebook’s IT infrastructure, for instance, is accounted by minimalistic servers stripped of the ‘added value’ components, which results in a drastic reduction in power consumption.

These servers are manufactured by Hewlett-Packard and they’re even gaining traction among others as a part of the Open Compute Project.  The manufacturer started offering them to a select range of customers, and now rival Dell is looking to chip in on the action.

The hardware giant’s response to the competition is Copper, an ARM-based box that’s specifically designed for hyperscale data centers – the lower power consumption, high performance type that Facebook helped pioneer.  It hasn’t reached general availability yet and no release date has been given, but Dell has already started incorporating it into its strategy.

The server is based on chips that are commonly found in mobile devices.

Datacenter Dyanmics reports that Copper is already used by a limited number of customers, including Ubuntu distributor Canonical and Hadoop luminary Cloudera. Clusters powered by the new hardware will soon be found in Dell’s Solution Centers as well the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Dell said it began testing ARM server technology internally in 2010, responding to customers’ need for higher density and energy efficiency. The company has worked with its hyper-scale customers to understand how interested they really were in ARM and what they had expected.

One of the most recent updates from this space came from DataDirect Networks. The company’s Web Object Scaler software paved its way to becoming a member of Open Compute two weeks ago.