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.

Comments

Faceboook

[yeshuawatso]

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.

Re:Faceboook

[hedwards]

The difference is that Google at least lubes up before performing the search...

Re:Now if only...

[by (1706743)]

by (1706743) and 4 others like this.

Re:Source Code

[ackthpt]

PHP?

Why for?

Indeed. FORTRAN IV was good for my father, it's good enough for me.

Re:What a waste of time and space

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Re:Awesome

[drpimp]

Feng shui ?

Re:Using CentOS

[QuantumRiff]

Facebook publicly says they use CentOS. They also have a large Mirror for lots of different Open Source tools: https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

Finally, no video system on a server

[kriston]

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.

Re:Finally, no video system on a server

[mariushm]

Server video cards embedded on motherboard don't use the system ram, they have an embedded 8 to 128 MB memory chip. Sure, they have a tiny frame buffer in the system ram but there are other things using more system memory than that frame buffer.

As for power usage, such plain vga video card embedded on the motherboard uses a couple of watts on idle - the chip doesn't even need a heatsink so it's not really a power saving feature if you remove it.

You would be saving much more power by using a power supply with high efficiency and wattage close to the actual server usage, instead of using (optionally redundant) 500-800 watts server power supplies.

Seriously, complaining about a few watts... some 1U servers have at least 4 x 40 mm high speed fans inside, each using 2-5 watts of power (because they run at max speed all the time) and you're complaining about a couple of watts on a video card.