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Can Open Hardware Transform the Data Center?
1sockchuck writes "Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building these facilities? This week the Open Compute Project gained momentum and structure, forming a foundation as it touted participation from IT heavyweights Intel, Dell, Amazon, Facebook, Red Hat and Rackspace. That turnout is not an isolated event, but reflects a growing focus on collaborative projects to reduce cost, timelines and inefficiency in data center construction and operation. The Open Compute project is just one of a handful of initiatives to bring standards and repeatable designs to IT infrastructure."
I don't really see how Facebook is a walled garden company. Yes, they don't open up their own most important platform, but if that makes them walled garden company then Google is too. They both do, however, contribute large amounts of code and side-projects (especially in high performance web services side), and Facebook goes even further and opens up their datacenter infrastructure too. Like you said, Google keeps that secret.
You may not like Facebook's other practices, but they do actually contribute a lot to open source. Much more than any other company.
How about we actually stop the insanity that promulgates the need for the insanely sized data centers? Use smart caching, java applets and just send business logic via the connection instead of the bloated insanity of html. Instead of shoe-horning an intentionally stateless 'square peg' protocol into the 'round hole' actually go with something rational. Then your data servers only need to deal with business logic and you farm out more of your processing requirements to clients. (aka the rational approach). I despair when I see what applets (irrespective of the language - just the general concept) could have provided us and where we are now in 2012.
(P.S. I can spell, honest! It's just UK engrish)
I don't know about the general consensus on this but when I refer to Facebook as being a walled garden I am actually referring to the way people use it. they go in there, produce content (discussions, status updates, wall posts links, fan pages and most importantly: trends) and the rest of the Internet doesn't really get a whif of all that happening. Now at this point a lot of people would get started on privacy theories but the fact that matters is that applications like facebook take the Internet and turn it into an intranet. That in the long term is degenerative for the Internet and quite dangerous to communicational freedom actually. Now I won't go the route proclaiming that I don't use introversial social platforms because I do use them, since they work but I really don't think that the wide adoption of them is a productive thing. The Internet was much more productive when everybody had his personal blog.
-- no sig today
That is not what a walled garden is. A walled garden is exactly what the metaphor says it is: a wonderful place to be, but there are walls. Keeping others out, but also you in. And you don't have the keys to the gate. Someone else acts as the gatekeeper on your behalf. In computer terms, that means the platform is locked down, and to do anything, it must be first approved by The Management.
It is different from jail because, being a garden, the user/prisoner doesn't really mind it so much and maybe even likes it. A gated community is great until you piss off the homeowner's association.
At a commodity level it is simply about who has the biggest distribution channel and who can get the stuff made for the lowest cost, probably somewhere in China. Since it is all commodity stuff there really isn't a secret about drivers, firmware or manufacturing.
Move up the scale a little bit to real managed servers with fault-tolerant redundant parts and real diagnostics and you have left the commodity vendors behind. And now there is a considerable value difference between Vendor A's approach and Vendor B's approach. You also have the situation where Vendor A's stuff integrates well with Vendor C but not Vendor B.
Google set a somewhat different standard for building a data center and doing it totally with commodity hardware. Cheap commodity hardware. As far as I know, this example has not been replicated by anyone large. I suspect a significant portion of Google's effort in building a data center this way was dealing with non-fault-tolerant hardware and systems with no management and/or diagnostics. It means stuff is going to go down at random times and you just have to deal with it by pulling the whole unit. I guess it works for them. I suspect most other data center level operations really aren't run as a distributed cluster where the cluster is fault-tolerant but the pieces are not. We are still pretty much at the beginning of clustering and fault-tolerant systems with complete fallover support as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Understand that if a company is supplying nothing but commodity hardware (think the low end of Dell), they can be immediately replaced with any other commodity supplyer. Which is why Dell is getting out of the commodity PC business - there is no value proposition in it. On the other hand, Dell supplying servers which are not commodity hardware but using lots of custom parts and firmware means (a) they can supply much higher value to the data center and (b) they are not easily replaced by competitors that do not have matching parts and firmware. Making that level of hardware "open" is suicide because then you have turned your high value hardware into a commodity with no value at all.