Photo Tour of Facebook's Open Source Datacenter

An anonymous reader writes "Robert Scoble has published fantastic photo tour of Facebook's new open source data center. This datacenter is the most energy efficient in the world. The Google and other datacenters are pushing back against new efficiency requirements for a while, and an open source competitor will only make things better for the rest of us."

Comments

Open source data center?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

So, where can I download the blueprint of it?

Re:Open source data center?

[MoonBuggy]

Here.

Not quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not the most energy-efficient in the world. The numbers they published were only from a VERY limited timespan during the coldest part of the year when energy needed for cooling would be drastically lowered.

If they published a full-year figure, I can guarantee you it wouldn't be nearly as good as the published one.

PUE tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

Several large data center operators are trying to win this "most efficient" title and putting lots of innovation and resources into them. However, you need to be very careful at comparing the outcome. First notice the actual claim, "most efficient". The Facebook data center consumes water to reduce energy needs. This can be a very dangerous practice if followed on a large scale. Consider the recent annex of a US government site in Utah in order to get priority water service. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/03/09/annexation-boosts-cooling-for-nsa-data-center/

So far, anyone attempting to lay claim on the "most efficient" title has moved things from the cooling column, sometimes into the computer load column (most notably fans), sometimes over to water consumption. Yes, you get a better efficiency awarded if you consume more power in non cooling areas.

The quote showing when this came up is so true;
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -- Lily Tomlin

Re:PUE tricks

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Depending on how local power is generated, the power consumption column may or may not be hiding a substantial amount of water use as well(the giant cooling towers, billowing clouds of steam that weren't successfully recovered, are not there for show, nor is the siting of many sorts of power plants next to bodies of water just because operators like paying more for picturesque real estate with flood risks.) Some flavors of mining are pretty nasty about using and/or filling with delightsome heavy metals and such, water resources as well.

I don't mean to detract from your, eminently valid, point that there are a lot of accounting shell games, in addition to actual engineering, going on when being "efficient"; but it is really necessary to decompose all the columns in order to figure out what is hiding under each of the shells(and how nasty each something is).

Swamp coolers are a great way(in non-humid areas) to reduce A/C costs and increase clean freshwater use. Whether or not that is a better choice than using more energy strongly depends on how your friendly local energy producer is producing. Odds are that they are consuming cooling water(or hydropower's consumption of water with potential energy); but it isn't always clear how much.

Regardless, though, what you Really, Really, Really want to avoid is situations where archaic, weak, nonsensical, and/or outright corrupt regulatory environments allow people to shove major costs under somebody else's rug. Why do they grow crops in the California desert? Because the 'market price', such as it is, of water sucked from surrounding states is virtually zero. Why are there 20-odd water-bottling operations in Florida, a state barely above sea-level and with minimal water resources? Because the cost of a license to pump alarming amounts(you guys weren't using those everglades for anything, right?) of water is basically zero(unless you are a resident, of course, they face water shortages. Trying incorporating next time, sucker). Similar arguments could be made that energy users in a number of locales are paying absurdly low rates for the Appalachian coal regions being turned into a lunar theme park, among other possibilities.

Playing around with 'efficiency' numbers is a silly game; but largely harmless PR puffery. Making resource tradeoffs that are sensible simply because they allow you to shove major costs onto other people at no cost to yourself is all kinds of serious.

Re:PUE tricks

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, Living in Canada, I always laugh when they talk about water conservation. Not that we should waste it, but we have much bigger environmental problems to worry about. If there was anywhere near a shortage, it wouldn't cost only a couple buck for a cubic meter (1000 L). Most of the problems with water in this world are a distribution problem, not a supply problem. And water is something that is quite expensive to transport. It's not like you can dehydrate the water to bring the weight down.

Re:Open Source

[MoonBuggy]

One of the reasons this will probably work well is that Facebook has the advantage of not being in the data centre business per se. They use data centres, sure, but they don't sell them, which means they have nothing to fear from competitors copying their good ideas. Major hosting companies would quite likely be more reluctant to say "here's our great new idea, any ideas on how to improve it?", because they have much more to lose if someone comes along, works out an improvement, and then implements it for themselves rather than passing it back to the community.

Re:Open Source

[jonbryce]

You can surely get "carbon neurtral" in there somewhere?

Coal fired power is not a good idea

[mauriceh]

This is a site in a location where most of the power is from coal fired generators.
Totally lacking in foresight.
What happens when coal generation is banned in a few years?

Ewww, commodity

[the linux geek]

I have to wonder how much power that would use if it ran on mainframes or large UNIX servers rather than unreliable and relatively slow clusters of small machines. It's strange that none of the "new generation" websites are choosing to go with bigger systems, despite the fact that they tend to perform better on both performance and power/performance.

Re:Ewww, commodity

[turbidostato]

"they've grown in a culture of commodity PCs and think everything is equally unreliable, so why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to fail at the same rate?"

I don't think that's exactly their point.

The point is more "why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to eventually fail anyway?" If it's going to fail eventually, you'll have to program-around the failure mode, but once you properly program-around system failure why going with the more expensive equiment? Go with the cheaper one and allow it to fail more frequently, since it really doesn't matter now.

Re:Seems... Wasteful

[larry bagina]

It's open source. Fix it yourself.

photo tour

[perryizgr8]

with an iphone!
how hard would it have been to take a proper camera? the photos are almost unlookable!

How much less power would they consume?

[srodden]

How much less power would they consume if they didn't plug in the silly blue lights on all the servers? Per machine it can't be too much but across a data centre that size, it must add up to several hundred watts. It's not like they need to whip out an epeen at a LAN day.