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Facebook Opens Their Data Center Infrastructure
gnu let us know about Facebook releasing specifications for their data center infrastructure as an open hardware project. They've released detailed electrical and mechanical data for everything from the server motherboards to the data center power distribution system. Digging further reveals that the specifications are licensed under the new Open Web Foundation Agreement which appears to be an actual open license. The breadth of data released really is quite amazing.
So can we get our hands on the source code as well? Ahem ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
So open to our partners we'll even give them access to the servers themselves to poke around in your personal info directly.
On a serious note, the data center is pretty cool. Here's another source of pretty blue images that show better images regarding the evaporation cooling system.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37295/?a=f
You might have to 'skip' a couple HP ads but after about 2 or 3 they get the message that you're not interested.
They would stop pestering me about how I need to get back on Facebook and blather on about everything I've been doing lately.
i mean, that's what /. is for. ffs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Open source data centers? Can things really be that lame?
Where's the storage? Where's the fault tolerance? Where's the monitoring? Where's the fire suppression? Where are the diesel generators? Where's the physical security?
Where's....jeesh...there's so much more to a datacenter than just servers and racks.
Some yahoo just got the idea to apply "open source" to something random. Damned if it makes any sense at all, but hey, it's OPEN SOURCE, so it's got to be GREAT!
Meh. Idiots all.
in soviet russia facebook opens you
It's interesting, if they didn't didn't play the background music at twice the volume as the people talking.
This is the sort of stuff everybody can benefit from. I wish more companies did this. And as an Oregon resident, this is doubly good for my state. BTW, what are large concrete security barriers doing there around the facebook data center? Is Facebook concerned about someone bombing them? Or do they serve a different purpose?
At least Zuckerburg is consistent when it comes to sharing information.
I wish they'd release more than just the raw data; I'd love to hear/read what & how they came to the final design. Their quasi-competitor Google has always been good with this! (Remember the Chrome zines?)
Is it just me, or has Facebook been slashdotted? The page has been loading the whole time I typed this.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
how many of us are in a position where we need "open" plans on how to build a sparkly new data centre to serve half a billion people?
Listen facebook, if you want to do something worthwhile for humanity, you are in an amazing position to do so. Your actions right now are defining what we mean by "privacy" for the next century or more. If you sat down and wrote up a privacy policy with the sincerity as if you were writing the US constitution - defining your terms and what rights people should have - then you would be doing a great service to humanity
as it is, you're just showing off
Buried in the Intel Motheboard PDF on page 10 section 6.8 it says they're using CentOS 5.2 as the OS:
Also, in the chassis design it seems there are rubber passthrus to allow cables to go between servers above and below each other.
Not sure how practical a PSU optimized for 277V input is for general use and the 450W max power is a bit tight for some Nehalem based configurations but overall it's pretty cool. The cold side containment, open frame cases, air side economizer, higher set points are now pretty standard design consideration. The airflow and fan optimizations were very cool but I'm not sure how applicable they are to most datacenters with a variable demand (I imagine FB runs their servers at a constant workload with only enough unused capacity to account for other datacenter outages).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The lights are even powered by Power-Over-Ethernet. Slick. Anyone know who supplies these?
From http://opencompute.org/specs/Open_Compute_Project_Data_Center_v1.0.pdf :
4.11 LED Lighting Systems
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 local manual override.
Programmable alerts via flashing LEDs.
Your title reads: "Facebook Opens Their Data Center Infrastructure 35"
Since the word Facebook is singular it requires signular verbs and singular possessive adjectives. You have have the singular verb but have a plural possessive adjective.
The title should read: "Facebook Opens ITS Data Center Infrastructure 35"
...Their not actually trying to make anything open source, so much as get others to conform to their system to make future expansion easier. Good to know, at least as a warning I suppose.
What are they using for switching infrastructure? How are they handling incoming web load distribution?
Are they referring to the actual GNU organization or just some random /. user with username "gnu?"
Looking over the site, it's mostly warm fuzzies (look how green we are) and obvious (the system board specs are mostly bog standard reference designs). The chassis aren't particularly dense or make efficient use of the airflow, and no system vendor can ship implementations of this without running afoul of FCC regulations. There seems to be a lot of thought centered around a tech doing in-depth failure analysis of a failed board in person when even base boards come with IPMI implementations that allow all that to be done remotely. ROL is frankly a horribly dumb idea when you have IPMI capability in nearly every server board with acknowldgement and security. I know I'll get hit with people saying that IPMI costs extra, but the essentially free variants are sufficient to remove the RS232 connector and compete with 'ROL'. The free variants also tend to be flaky and sometimes need static arp tables, but so does WOL (in effect).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Google perceives its datacenter know how as its major strength. This sort of removes a bit of that strength.
I'm looking forward to hearing how this fits into MZ's world domination plans.
So, nothing about the LAN / SAN?
Finally, it's so refreshing to see a server system specification that does not call for a video system, does not have onboard video, and properly directs console output to a serial port.
I've been disgusted with all the VGA crash carts, PS/2 keyboards and mice in server rooms, and all those video processors eating up system memory on servers. Servers should not have video.
Think of all the carbon dioxide and excess energy consumed by all the idle on-board video processors on most x86 and x64 servers out there. I shudder to think of all the planets resources being wasted displaying a graphical user interface that nobody will ever see, and, worse, reserving precious memory that should be used to serve users holding a useless frame buffer.
Have you ever smirked at a Linux server machine that is still running X and six virtual consoles? This news is really exciting that someone is honestly taking server hardware design seriously, just like Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, IBM, and others did in the 1980s and 1990s before all these x86 servers came about.
Bravo, Facebook, on a job well done.
Kriston
What else can you do to get technies into your data mining database? "We support open source, our datacenter is omg huge and lets forget all privacy issues".
Interesting! Just how can you put together a data center and have YOUR SECURITY SUCK. I received TWO spams this week from my friends compromised accounts, even through it was a Victoria's Secret spam, it should have not come from my 13 y.o. nephew.
Facebook relies on Varnish... which is even slower than the HTTP servers it is supposed to "accelerate".
See this study where Nginx and Lighttpd, to cite only the well-known, are shown to be BOTH much faster and consume much less CPU resources:
http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/
No wonder why you can afford to open-source your projects when they are so crappy...
It is not the hardware I am concerned about, it is the software that's where evil is.
OK. Given 45 mins I can come up with at least 3 improvements.
Given a week? I could have at least made the case frame at least a pop-in-pop-out, no wires affair...
Give 1/10 of the time these loud mouths spent, I would have 4 up platters on bakery racks.
One easy hint! You are ordering at least 1000 motherboards, have the powersupply connector at a 90 degree angle so that it holds the powersupply connector to the side of the motherboard area, and holds the motherboard in. No screws. and for god sake... put some RAM in the machines.