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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, when will facebook's hardware people start using their own inventions?

I see them and other dotcoms pouring inordinate amount of money designing own hardware without actually manufacturing or using anything of it.

As I know, facebook still buys very plain OEM servers from Quanta

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Facebook does use it. They design their own hardware, but they are do not manufacture it themselves, they aren't in the hardware manufacturing business. They parter with companies like Quanta to do that.

Here's an older article that explains the relationship: https://venturebeat.com/2014/01/29/facebook-quanta/

I'm well aware that. I'm saying that in a sense that they don't buy or use much of the original "ocp platform" they show off at their events.

And much of it was said to have ended after limited deployment in their Prineville DC, after which they switched back to regular OEM quanta gear with just few things like blue-green handlebars added, and "barebone" motherboard trays.

I've been whispered that the biggest buyers of the original "ocp platform" gear is not even facebook these days, but some banks

I think you need better sources

So, do they?? Can you tell if that's the case?

So your theory is, what, that Facebook spends tons of money designing multiple generations of hardware that they don't use? Why would that make any sense?

It doesn't and that is what baffles me

So.... maybe it's worth considering that your initial premise is faulty?

Well, in that case I just got disinformated. My buddy worked in their DC, and that was his first hand account: "OCP stuff came with major deficiencies, haphazardly reverting everything back to off the shelf U1s"

Facebook's entire blob storage and data warehouse (multi-exabyte) is run completely on OCP storage hardware built by ODMs, of which Quanta is included. Anyone telling you that we don't use OCP is grossly misinformed.

Source: I was on the blob storage team when we migrated all of our data from OCP's gen1 storage design [1] to the new gen2 storage design [2].

1: https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-open-vault-st...

2: https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-bryce-canyon-...

edit: corrected links.

Well, then it is.

What do you use for regular servers these day?

More OCP hardware (or designs that will eventually be contributed to OCP), in many different SKUs depending on use case. This page lists most of the current-gen hardware that I am aware of:

https://www.opencompute.org/contributions?refinementList%5Bc...

    without actually manufacturing or using anything of it.

    As I know, facebook still buys very plain OEM servers from Quanta

This is false, as you can see from publicly available pictures of FB datacenters. Facebook purchases OCP servers from ODMs.

ODMs or OEMs?

ODM - Original Design Manufacturer, the specifications and some design work is done by FB and then this company goes and actually designs and builds the equipment that FB buys.

ODMs = System Integrators, if you're familiar with that term instead?

There's several companies that will do large scale bespoke-design server manufacturing and assembly work.

Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al. all order servers through them that are built to specifications their hardware engineers have designed (usually in collaboration with them). Once you get above a certain scale, the value proposition of OEMs goes out the window.

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