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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.
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!
Open source design of data center hardware - power, compute nodes, storage, rack and cable layouts. The problem is that everyone's needs are slightly different.
The guy in charge of selling data center computing as a service thinks that most companies should buy their data center computing from a company like his instead of rolling their own.
And this is surprising or controversial why?
In other news, the guy from Cisco thinks that companies will be looking to Cisco for fast, stable networking. And the guy from Intel thinks that companies will be looking to Intel for power efficient data center solutions.
This doesn't make them luddites.... it makes them salesmen.
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
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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.
236 points when playing buzzword scrabble?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because there are also OCP network equipments, like a switch design from Facebook that lets you do software defined networks easily.
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
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.
Given that this is Slashdot, I believe the appropriate reply to your question is "a Raspberry Pi Beowulf cluster, enclosed in a 3D-printed 1U rackmount unit with a cooling system controlled by an Arduino".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Do people not see the connection between increases in privacy breeches and the moves to cloud systems?
The correlation is negative. Cloud companies have better security than a typical small company trying to roll their own solution.
Monitored by drones.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I don't disagree entirely.
Clouds are a huge attack surface populated by some impressive names.
Hell, the feds can't keep their doors shut.
I do the best I can with my law firm in-house and I use best of breed off the shelf protection.
That's my risk assessment.
I don't sell widgets and it's already in the news that Bubba got in a car wreck and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And not employing enough females and minorities.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Do people not see the connection between increases in privacy breeches and the moves to cloud systems?
Well, I'm not wearing any pants.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Do not worry. Someone will be along shortly to tell you that it is attitudes like your's that prevent women from applying to the tech jobs in the first place. Me? I understand the difference between something said in jest here and something said in a work environment. Though I may have now preempted the aggressive comment(s).
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The average person with a brain will realize that they are too stupid to trust with their own data. Only the elite 1% know what they are doing, the 99% just follow what they're told as "best practices" without realizing they're using the wrong best practices for the wrong thing because they don't understand the problem the best practice was meant to solve.
Hate to break it to ya software has always defined networks.
There is a lot of noise about moving the management side out of the chassis. This does not magically make a L3 switch with a a 32k entry fib work as a core BGP router. In some ways it's nice you can stop paying your vendor for massively overpriced licences to turn on sunk cost features. It gets very scary when they want to throw boxes all over the place but centralize management. It realy seems like an excuse to keep putting in pitifully small CPU on L3 devices where a few hundred bucks for a xeon to run the high level stuff overseeing a mips arm etc that's dealing with low level hardware.
But I guess it's to be expected these were the same sort of people that though 2 switches in a stack were redundant.
No sir I dont like it.
Not sure if trolling or just oblivious. This isn't about 'cloud' -- this is about "maybe, if you're going to build a large datacenter, you can not re-invent the wheel and use standardized DC components, courtesy of a ton of research work FB did to optimize the BOM."
Cloud companies will provide the cheapest possible security they can get away with
Cloud companies have invested billions in data centers. They are not going to skimp on security, risk a big breach, and see all of that investment go down the drain along with their reputation. They have a very strong incentive to provide good security.