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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 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.
by (1706743) and 4 others like this.
PHP?
Why for?
Indeed. FORTRAN IV was good for my father, it's good enough for me.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But didn't you just demonstrate the value by listing off the issues as you perceive them? Next step is discussion of your points to see if they are/are not addressed. Congratulations on your contribution to the open development process.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Feng shui ?
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
mmm, I must admit to developing in PHP.
Building purely event-driven systems using the language is more and more appearing to be lipstick on a pig. I'm can't invest a tonne of energy like facebook into severely beating the language into some semblance of efficiency.
Ugh, I guess I should motivate myself to become more proficient in Python or Java.
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.
Hey, Fortran IV was good for me too - but not good enough. The computer center director at the university at which I was working offered to help me get one of my programs working, but only if I rewrote it in Pascal. So I did.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
by (1706743) and 4 others like this.
Actually... that's a good point. We can currently alter relationships with other users on here, but it'd be interesting if we could "like" posts -- and see how that rating compared to regular moderation. You could even go so far as to say "5 friends, 10 friends of friends, 30 foes and 500 friends of foes liked this." Take it even further, and add "If you liked this comment, you may also like..." and provide a widget that lists comments/submissions liked by friends and friends of friends.
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.
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.
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