Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers. Facebook has shared many details of its new server and data center design on Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project article and project. Open Compute Project effort will bring this web scale computing to the masses. The new data center is designed for AMD and Intel and the x86 architecture.
You might ask Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters? The answer is that Facebook has opened up a whole new front in its war with Google over top technical talent and ad dollars. “By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware,” Facebook writes, “our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects. Our first step is releasing the specifications and mechanical drawings. The second step is working with the community to improve them.”
By the by this data center approach has some similarities to Google data center designs, at least to details they have published. Despite Google’s professed love for all things open, details of its massive data centers have always been a closely guarded secret. Google usually talks about its servers once they’re obsolete.
Open Compute Project is not the first open source server hardware project. How to build cheap cloud storage article shows another interesting project.
Can Open Hardware Transform the Data Center?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/30/0614234/can-open-hardware-transform-the-data-center
Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building these facilities? This week the Open Compute Project gained momentum and structure, forming a foundation as it touted participation from IT heavyweights Intel, Dell, Amazon, Facebook, Red Hat and Rackspace.
Can Open Hardware Transform the Data Center?
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/10/28/can-open-hardware-transform-the-data-center/
Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building data centers? The Open Compute Project, an initiative begun in April by Facebook, is gaining partners, momentum and structure. Yesterday it unveiled a new foundation and board to shepherd the burgeoning movement.
If the project doesn’t succeed, it won’t be for lack of support. Yesterday’s second Open Compute Summit in New York featured appearances from executives for some of the sector’s leading names – Intel, Dell, Amazon, Facebook, Red Hat and Goldman Sachs. The audience was filled with data center thought leaders from Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and many other companies with large data center operations.
There are signs that the Open Compute designs could become more practical for a broader array of data center customers in the future.
Missing from the dais were companies specializing in power, cooling and mechanical design – areas where Open Compute designs are being shared.
Here is an interesting article that shows details of “Open Compute” Server and compares it to a HP server
Facebook’s “Open Compute” Server tested
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4958/facebooks-open-compute-server-tested
The Facebook Open Compute server design is ambitious: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers which is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” Even better is that Facebook Engineering sent two of these Open Compute servers to our lab for testing, allowing us to see how these servers compare to other solutions in the market.
The Facebook Open Compute servers have made quite an impression on us. Remember, this is Facebook’s first attempt to build a cloud server!
Comments:
It seems to me that the HP server is doing as well as the Facebook ones. Considering it has more featuers (remote management, integrated graphics) and a “common” PSU.
HP: Hard drive shortages hitting Google, Facebook DIY servers
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/hp-hard-drive-shortages-hitting-google-facebook-diy-servers/64026
The do-it-yourself server crowd is apparently having trouble procuring hard drives due to the floods in Thailand.
Google and Facebook may already be squeezed by hard drive shortages, says HP’s CEO.
Facebook s new energy efficient data center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xI4w0eR0Y&feature=related
Inside Facebook’s Server Room
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhOo1ZtrH8c&feature=related
data center facebook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DRxqHrPrFw&feature=related
Facebook’s Oregon Data Center Uses As Much Power As Entire County
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/31/0355228/facebooks-oregon-data-center-uses-as-much-power-as-entire-county
“The first phase of the Facebook data center in Oregon uses 28 megawatts of utility power, local officials said this week. That’s not extraordinary for a facility of that size in most data center hubs. But it stands out in Crook County, Oregon where all the homes and business other than Facebook use 30 megawatts of power.
[...] of the facilities and the thousands of computers that go inside. However, despite significant improvements in efficiency, the exponential growth in cloud computing far outstrips these energy [...]
Facebook unfriends 19-inch data center racks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/02/open_compute_summit_open_rack/
Social media giant Facebook had built precisely one data center in its short life, the one in Prineville, Oregon, before it had had enough of an industry standard that was part of the railroad infrastructure and then the telephone infrastructure build outs and bubbles: The 19-inch rack for mounting electronic equipment.
At the Open Compute Summit in San Antonio, Texas, Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook and one of the founders of the Open Compute Project, said it was time to get rid of the old 19-inch rack and give it a skosh more room – two inches to be precise – to do a better job of packing compute, storage, and networking gear in data centers and provide better airflow over components.
By stick with the current 19-inch racks and their limitations, “we all end up with racks gone bad,” explained Frankovsky
Given the tech industry experience with this sort of rack – and the fact that equipment rooms, tools, and techniques for bending metal to make electronics were all standardized on 19-inch racks, it made sense for the computer industry to adopt the same form factors when machines started getting racked up in volume in the late 1980s.
The rollout today of the Open Rack standard being proposed by the OCP is just one in what will no doubt be a lot of standards that are re-thought in the next several years by companies building hyperscale data centers.
The problem with 19-inch racks is that people try to cram too much gear into them, and they often end up poking out the back of the rack, which messes up the hot aisles in data centers. Maybe you can get a parts cart down the aisle now, and maybe you can’t. And racks are also packed with a bazillion network cables and heavy power cables, which makes maintenance of the machines in a rack difficult.
“Blades were a great promise,” said Frankovsky. “Companies needed help, and once blades came out, they said, ‘Please don’t help us anymore.’” By going back to the drawing board and coming up with the Open Rack design, Frankovsky says that the engineers at the social media company have come up with a scheme that is “blades done right.”
The OCP wants for vendors to adopt the Open Rack standard, but they may never do it except for the hyperscale data center customers that might pick up the Facebook designs and use them in their own data centers (or adapt the ideas with tweaks).
“Let’s face it, guys. There’s only so many different ways to bend metal,” said Frankovsky, referring to the ways that vendors try to tweak their rack designs to make them a little bit different and how they did not standardize (as they could have) on blade server and chassis form factors a decade ago. “By completely standardizing the mechanicals and electricals, this is going to help us stay away from racks gone bad.”
By going with a 21-inch wide rack design, the Open Rack can put five 3.5-inch drives across horizontally inside of a single server tray. Moreover, it can also put three skinny two-socket server nodes across on a tray and still have plenty of room for memory slots. Considering that the 3.5-inch disk is still the cheapest and densest storage device
The Open Rack also has power trays that are separate from the servers, which allows servers to be even denser and gives more flexibility in what you can put in the rack in terms of servers, storage, and networking. The idea is that when a new processor from Intel or AMD comes out, you replace as few of the components as possible to get the CPU upgrade and leave everything else in place.
Chinese web powerhouses Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba were already working on their own custom rack designs that have some features similar to the Open Rack design, called “Project Scorpio,” and Frankovsky said in a blog post that the two camps were working out how to converge their respective racks to a single standard by 2013.
Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150144039563920
This meant we could:
Use a 480-volt electrical distribution system to reduce energy loss.
Remove anything in our servers that didn’t contribute to efficiency.
Reuse hot aisle air in winter to both heat the offices and the outside air flowing into the data center.
Eliminate the need for a central uninterruptible power supply.
The result is that our Prineville data center uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook’s existing facilities, while costing 24 percent less.
Inspired by the model of open source software, we want to share the innovations in our data center for the entire industry to use and improve upon. Today we’re also announcing the formation of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide initiative to share specifications and best practices for creating the most energy efficient and economical data centers.
Open Compute Developing Wider Rack Standard
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/05/03/1417232/open-compute-developing-wider-rack-standard
“Are you ready for wider servers? The Open Compute Project today shared details on Open Rack, a new standard for hyperscale data centers, which will feature 21-inch server slots, rather than the traditional 19 inches. “We are ditching the 19-inch rack standard,”