Slashdot Mirror
How Facebook Is Eating the $140 Billion Hardware Market
mattydread23 writes: It started out as a controversial idea inside Facebook. In four short years, the Open Compute Project has turned the $141 billion data-center computer-hardware industry on its head. This is the comprehensive history of the project, including interviews with founder Jonathan Heiliger and members of the financial services industry who are already on board, plus a dismissal from Google's own data center guru Urs Holzle.
Yes but what IS "Open Compute Project".
I hear OCP is currently planning a move to Detroit to cut down on Silicon Valley overhead costs.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
When asked about OCP, Hölzle told us,"I think in the long term it’s less important because most people should not use their own racks even if it’s Open Compute ... It will be relevant only for the very, very large companies — for the Facebooks, the Ebays, the Microsofts."
But then, who among us needs computers anyway?
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Back in my IBM days, all of our departments had budgets, performance metrics and standards - KLOCs.
When I went to work on the Olympics, we were under the marketing department's budget.
We need an AIS machine ASAP. They put it on a jet and flew it out to us overnight from Texas and we had it at 6AM. We asked for it at 8PM the previous night.
Do not underestimate the MarketingSide. In the MarketingSide, there is UNLIMITED POWER! UN..LIMIT..ED..POW..ERRRRRR!
Facebook is part of the DarkSide. The ability to get your data - one way or another - is what drives our economy and allows Silicon Valley to exist.
3. Brand name PC and server manufacturers are now on board.
4. ??
5. Profit!
I see a ton of stuff about server hardware in that article but I don't see anything that explains how this will trounce cisco who is 90% networking hardware.
LTO - Linear Tape Open - has been a mega success in driving up cross manufacturer compatibility, and driving down the cost of tape backup. As a consequence, tape use has gone up. (Possibly assisted by increased amounts of data, and the fact that it is now obvious than not even NSA and GCHQ can keep their data secure "in the cloud").
LTO is made by players like HP, IBM, Sony.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
.
That makes sense because Facebook's service requirements are not transportable to other industries, but Facebook's hardware needs may be.
Meanwhile, google is providing services to companies, and is looking to make those services transportable.
I wouldn't say that google is "dismissing" Facebook's strategy but instead, google is working a few levels above it.
So they basically "invented" 21" wide racks, between 19" and 23" already existing. Still backwardian. Still boring.
So many chances to actually put some modern considerations to good use in their specs. But nooooo.
All they really did was show they're a big boy by throwing their weight around. It didn't actually improve anything.
They compare free open source software which is a product itself with open source designs for hardware which are just specifications hardware is still not free
The Open Compute Project initiative was announced in April 2011 by Facebook to openly share designs of data center products.[1] The effort came out of a redesign of Facebook's data center in Prineville, Oregon.[2] After two years, it was admitted that "the new design is still a long way from live data centers."[3] However, some aspects published were used in the Prineville center to improve the energy efficiency, as measured by the power usage effectiveness index defined by The Green Grid.[4]
The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit incorporated in the state of Delaware. Cole Crawford serves as the Foundation's Executive Director. Currently there are 7 individuals on the Board of Directors. Frank Frankovsky, formerly of Facebook is the Foundation's President and Chairman. Andy Bechtolsheim, Jason Taylor (Facebook), Jason Waxman(Intel), Don Duet(Goldman Sachs), Mark Roenick (Rackspace), and Bill Laing (Microsoft) are also Open Compute board members.
In 2015 March Apple, Cisco and Juniper Networks joined the project.[5]
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There have always been industry consortia standardizing this or that, such as VGA, Ethernet and VESA bus back in the PC's pre-internet days.
But this is different - it's an encompassing standard that basically says that if BrandX can claim that it followed OCP, their design is just as good as Lenovo, HP, or Dell. That is a big difference. Sure, quality control and service could be different, but is that worth paying a huge markup for? Maybe not, for many customers.
That means that anyone can look at, use, or modify the designs of the hugely expensive computers that big companies use to run their operations — all for free.
The idea of using XML as a hardware platform seemed a paint huffer's delight. .human readable," said Huffer.
"But. .
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
OPC ensures that manufacturing will never return to the US.
If there's no IP barriers all the competitive advantages are in the manufacturing process.
It's a huge gift to the Chinese hardware sector, because that's all they have.
It really isn't different, it just has the word 'Open' in it to get more legitimacy.
That's not to say that's a bad thing (VGA, Ethernet, and such all clearly are a success for getting standardization across the board.).
if BrandX can claim that it followed OCP, their design is just as good as Lenovo, HP, or Dell.
That's not quite the situation. OCP has been pretty open ended and such a vendor can do a great deal of things and still be considered OCP. The designs can be worse, as good, or better. For example, the OCP Mezz comes in several different flavors that can differ, with different clearances above and below. So if you buy one server with an 'OCP Mezz' slot and one 'OCP Mezz' adapter, they might not fit together. It's a better situation than Lenovo, HP, and Dell have been doing (totally proprietary connections if you want a smaller form factor or NC-SI connectivity), but less than practical. When MS decided to get into it, they didn't adopt the existing designs, not even the width of the racks. They had an entirely different set of schematics and designs even including the rack because they didn't like what was there. There's more effort into letting people do whatever they like to get notoriety for the project than there is in convincing people to come to something resembling a practical consensus. At this point saying 'it's an OCP design' is about as descriptive is 'it's an x86 based server that goes into a rack some how or another'
Sure, quality control and service could be different, but is that worth paying a huge markup for?
Note that some of that quality control can have big big differences. For example select a different brand of some innocuous seeming component like capacitors or something and the difference could mean 25% performance delta if the firmware doesn't calibrate things right.
I always take Business Insider articles with a grain of salt. They tend to be half-marketing / half-reporting all the time.
I guess I'm supposed to already know all about this, right?
Yes, but I believe more so for what you claimed as a possibly. A lot of large companies have a lot more data that disk based backups do not make sense. Tape has shifted away from the daily and monthly backups and more for the extended retention like 60-360 days and beyond.
Under 60 or so days, the snapshot (you can argue if a snapshot is really a backup, even one replicated to another physical location) and compressed and deduped disk/cloud based still rule.
We just liquidated our last StorageTek robotic library (older LTO4) thanks to our company reducing our retention down from 1 year down to 60 days. In the future, I could see us getting another one as we continue to mass large amounts of data that we can't archive off or tier to somewhere else. Just for reference, we currently "protect" or backup about 260TB of data.
Essentially what you are doing is speculating
You traded your money that sit idle in the bank into a piece of land which is still sitting idle, in the middle of a devastated region
You are doing that in the hope that something might happen to that devastated region
I understand that Slashdot is the place for economic / investment forum, but, for me, trading the idling pattern in one form into another makes absolutely no sense
I too have idling money in bank accounts, but whenever that happens I move it into something that is more active, where someone else works for the entities in which my money has been invested, and in return I get the dividend
No, I am not the one investing the strategy - I copied it from a very famous guy - Warren Buffett
Over the years that strategy has benefited me tremendously - now my investment portfolio has companies from USA, Europe, Asia, South America and even Africa
I do not stick to one industry either - from the usual technological based companies to companies involved in farming equipment to eucalyptus plantations (to make paper) to food production - as long as the companies are doing real job and produce real stuffs and as long as they are not involved in illegal activities, whenever I have extra funds laying around I am always on the look out for new and exciting venues to invest
And oh yes, I've dipped my toes into virtual currencies too
I wouldn't say that google is "dismissing" Facebook's strategy but instead, google is working a few levels above it
I am not disputing what you say but to add one crucial thing ...
Currently there is absolutely nothing which prevents Google from adopting the OCP standard, and/or using the OCP hardware
Google's concern right now is to get people to use their cloud, hardware wise Google has a lot of options available to them:
1. Continue to keep their hardware proprietary
2. Adopt the OCP hardware
3. Hybrid their hardware with that of OCP offerings (which means they have to opensource the changes they made to OCP)
4. Go for a newer, more robust design
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's a huge gift to the Chinese hardware sector, because that's all they have.
For now. But it will change.