Facebook open sources its servers and data centers
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
I think you're going overboard in thinking that everything the big players do is about killing the other guy. Sometimes they just want to reduce costs. If you decide that part of your infrastructure isn't strategic to own, it always makes sense to be open.
If I was the only user of Google (and they had the same technology stack) then +1 aside - my experience would be the same as it is now. If I was the only user of facebook - what would be the point.
I disagree. At this point, I believe that because of how big google is and because of how profitable gaming google is, getting good results, I believe that more than half of the work of finding relevant search results is filtering out the people attempting to game the search engine.
I mean, it is /possible/ that the help they get from user's search histories outweighs the massive amount of effort spammers put in to making google suck, but I doubt it.
I bet that things are much easier for a new search engine while they are small enough that it's not worth much time and effort to game the results.
>Data center technology can benefit everybody, that's all I'm trying to say.
This is true, but I believe what other users are likely saying is that google probably alrealdy has something as good or better than this.
Personally, I won't get excited until someone starts building out co-location centers that have efficent cooling. Nearly all co-location centers use mixed air, and most end up keeping the place much cooler than required, and they pass on those costs to me.
The thing is, for anyone who is big enough to take advantage of their data center design, this isn't particularly new. I mean, it's great they are sharing the documentation of how they did it... but that mostly helps the little guys, and the little guys can't really take advantage of it... we're stuck in co-location centers, like I said, with antiquated cooling designs.
The chassis designs, on the other hand, might be great for the little guys. Hell, I am not that far away from enough scale to job out the chassis to a metal shop, and the design would be a pretty big part of that cost, that facebook just reduced to zero. Thanks!
But the power savings on the chassis are very small compared to the power savings on the cooling/data center design.
Badoom tsss
"which in turns lets Facebook rely on evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning."
So it runs at 65% relative humidity after the swamp coolers.
I doubt this would be possible in datacenters in more tropical environments (south Florida). Thoughts?
1. Navigate to twitter.com/scobleizer.
2. Observe first tweet.
That said, I lost all interest in the image due to the dumb focus effect.
"Process journalism" at work.
Mad Props.
Sorry ARM.
The next-generation high end ARM core, the Cortex A15, will be the first one that's intended to be suitable for server use: they've added virtualization support, PAE for up to 1TB of RAM, and cache coherency to their bus to support SMP. The server-oriented implementations will be quad-core 2.5Ghz chips, of which you would be able to put at least 4 on a motherboard like this. When they start hitting the market next year, they'll probably all but kill the market for Intel Atom-based servers.
If Facebook is already getting custom Intel and AMD motherboards, ARM motherboards should be no problem. (Note that a major undercurrent of Facebook's announcement is that "custom" is actually cheaper than "commodity" at "Web scale".) ARM server chips (Armada XP and Calxeda) don't have GPUs.
- new featureset mobos: stripped down, no parallel ports among other things I'm sure. there looked to be some SATA/Mini-USB type sockets. - fancy new power supplies - the triple racks don't seem to be anything special at face value, convenient maybe, but with the power features above two of these triple racks are serviced by one battery rack. So, you'd need, oh, 400+ servers to take full advantage at this level.
NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?
- Fancy power distribution and cabling and stuff, mostly part of the racks, possibly involving wacky connectors on the compute side. For smaller operations this would be like having a 60-outlet power strip.
- 95% efficient from plug to party-time. This helps with the bills.
- Using the room/building as the cooling mechanism. While this has likely been done before in some manner (at least an intentional use of stack-effect in HVAC), that weird slot that one of the boxes gets pushed into makes me think they have some kind of sealed thingy from floor to ceiling that interfaces with the racks, basically using the building cooling to push in and suck out air forced through the racks. at a basic level it's all about CFMs, after all. This could also be done with forced current from front to back, or vice versa.
whatever is going on here, you first have to get to the "your own server room" part of business. this can be had at smaller companies, too, but for the room-cool ducting you'd need to cut into walls and stuff in the server room to pipe that stuff in. Spendy.
So, this leaves the smalltimer to save $15 on their monthly power bill by using new rack servers that don't need or have an NVidia GeForce 9000+ and 10-drive RAID. Stripped down BIOS and maybe no more IDE support, that kind of thing. Hot Rod rack servers of the skeleton/pure-compute variety, not the AlienWare one.
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.datacenter_e...
The only details I was able to dig up are in the Data Center specs [1], and they're pretty brief:
> Energy-efficient LED lighting is used throughout the data center interior. / Innovative power over Ethernet LED lighting system. / Each fixture has an occupancy sensor with manual override. / Programmable alerts via flashing LEDs.
I wondered what the justification for PoE lighting could possibly be, sounds like all the lighting is also functional as instrumentation.
Anyone know more?
[1] http://opencompute.org/specs/Open_Compute_Project_Data_Cente...
Also, the network switches can output the PoE, so maybe it is easier to wire into/from the racks or overhead than a seperate AC line with conduit.
Labor installation and material costs may be less.
Also, since it is DC, and not an AC lighting source, interference may be less (just a guess).
And as you mentioned, the lighting as instrumentation.
LED lamps use DC power. The LED lamps that you can buy that screw into a standard Edison socket contain electronics to convert the AC line voltage into DC. This is inefficient -- generates heat and wastes power (though still not nearly as much as a traditional incandescent bulb).
By using power over Ethernet for their lighting, the datacenter can use cheaper, cooler, more efficient bulbs, and save a lot of money on the wiring too.
I can definitely foresee a future where new construction includes wiring for both line voltage AC and also low voltage DC. It could eliminate all the bulky transformers scattered around a typical house and save energy and money.
Edit: I agree it's a good thing, it's just that hosting a press event rather than just making the announcement through a blog post suggests other motives as well.
If a datacenter can run at 1.07 PUE (as Facebook's new datacenter does), then it directly translates to massive power cost savings. Environmental efficiency just comes along with it.
The more things they can throw at Google, especially now as the organization is digesting the CEO transition is nothing but win for Facebook.
Now if only there was a company whose non-core competency was Google-style spelling check ("Did you mean to search for..")
If FB can cause these servers to be offered as standard configurations and produced in (much) higher volumes than when produced as custom solutions built for for FB (or Google), then the costs to FB drop, and FB can potentially also get the vendors to compete with each other.
It's a clever move.
(If you're just running big DCs, and not looking to move into the cloud hosting business.)
The only thing I could come up with is that, anyone implementing these at scale (fb's competitors) has already committed substantial dollar amounts to existing infrastructure.
To leverage the minor improvements in design that will come of this, they would have to start by rolling out new facebook style racks/data centers.
Whereas, for facebook any design improvements would be easier to implement on a larger scale.
Either that or they are just do-gooders, which I highly doubt.
Was anything mentioned about the OS running the servers ? I presume it is an optimized linux, but who knows.
The fact they were making their own equipment, incorporating UPS functions in the power supplies of their servers, how they were cooling - the fact they get the cheapest cabling possible etc etc all played to their competitive advantage.
Highly efficient low cost commodity gear results directly in lower TCO / OPEX thus allowing you to do more where it counts.
With the mass defection of high level folks from google to facebook, and with the very agile innovative team that facebook has, it is just expected that strides in these areas would occur there as well.
This is one area where I have a lot of respect for what facebook is doing.
The impact may not be direct to tiny web companies - but organizations that have massive energy costs, specifically hospitals, can greatly benefit from this information.
The problem is though that hospitals are not IT companies, and thus they dont focus on the physical characteristics of their equipment or directly look at the designs of their datacenters as they buy gear from the big names we all know.
If companies like google and facebook work to get the suppliers to incorporate these design elements - it will result in organizations like hospitals benefiting in the long term. This is a good thing.
El Camino Hospital in Mountain View pays over $500K PER MONTH in power. Imagine if they can reduce that by say 20%
The biggest take away I have in looking at this information is the POE LED Lighting. I am really interested in this because of the impact it has on the overall electrical infrastructure in a large building.
Currently, you design your infrastructure so that you have emergency power backing your MPOE, DC and IDFs. This means that the more POE devices you have off the IDF, when utility power goes out, your supporting those devices via the UPS/generator infrastructure.
If you add lighting to this, its going to redistribute costs from the electrical/infrastructure expense to install and power the lighting, to adding a port on the switch and the requisite load on the IT side. I assume that the wattage per lumins could be less - and the overall cost of emergency lighting could be reduced in a very large facility.
This is right in line with the idea of "Technology is a utility" -- the number of devices and range of services we now hang off the network is amazing - lighting is just another example, and this will ultimately simplify and reduce the wiring infrastructure in your building.
Seems like everyone wins.
If you're running 'one' thing (like say a hadoop farm) and you can optimize out the things you don't need, there can be a pretty durable benefit in building your own machines.
People like Rackable, HP, Dell, or IBM who sell servers need to build them able to do 'anything' you might want, in order to do that cost effectively they often put things on the mother board (lowest marginal cost) which are perhaps not useful in all cases. However, when you're using lots of machines you have to power and cool those unused sound chips and USB hub chips, and may firewire ports that aren't really all that useful to a web app.
I talk about it as 'rack level' blades, basically motherboards on a cookie sheet that only have network and storage interfaces. Taking away a size constraint makes building them a lot easier (you don't need a custom backplane for example, you just plug cables in)