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Open Compute Project Comes Under Fire
judgecorp writes: The Open Compute Project, the Facebook-backed effort to create low-cost open source hardware for data centers has come under fire for a slack testing regime. The criticism was first aired at The Register where an anonymous test engineer described the project's testing as a "complete and total joke." The founding director of the project, Cole Crawford has penned an open letter in reply. The issue seems to be that the testing for standard highly-reliable hardware used by telcos and the like is very thorough and expensive. Some want the OCP to use more rigorous testing to replicate that level of reliability. Crawford argues that web-scale data centers are designed to cope with hardware failures, and "Tier 1" reliability would be a waste of effort.
it doesn't matter how many redundant servers you have, if they are all going to fail in the same way
I think the point is that so far it is only used by "the most successful corporations on the internet". In fact, you can probably count the number of organisations in the entire world that qualify on the fingers of one hand, though it will take a few more fingers to count how much money they have invested to reach this point.
Unfortunately, as lovely and friendly as all the Software Defined X advances seem with their mantra of openness, almost no-one is actually building a "web-scale data centre" with a 24/7 staff dedicated to just swapping out broken hardware and effectively unlimited resources to devote to designing hardware architectures and building control software that can cope with frequent failures without losing significant amounts of real money. For normal organisations, even those with heavy IT requirements and 12 figure market caps, running your critical infrastructure on hardware that does have a serious level of testing and consequent robustness may still be advantageous.
(Full disclosure: I sometimes work for clients in the networking industry, though whether an industry shift towards things like OCP would benefit or harm them would be open to debate so I think I'm still reasonably neutral here.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, I have a few issues with the cloud hype, starting with the scarcity of evidence to support claims about cloud services being cheaper and/or more secure and/or more reliable than doing things yourself. Every major cloud provider has had serious downtime, and there is only so much you can attribute to being more visible at greater scale or to users not configuring HA tools properly. Far too many on-line services also run into significant security/privacy problems. And cost-wise going with the cloud rather than your own systems tends to be favourable at certain levels (other things being equal) but it can be outrageously expensive in other cases.
These myths aren't really the point here anyway. The point in this case is that no matter how fast your recovery time may be, whatever was happening on your hardware at the time it failed is lost, and in some cases you simply can't make that transparent to your users. Not everything in the world of programming is a distributed map-reduce where losing a hardware node means you just redistribute the 0.0001% of the job it was doing to another and no-one notices. Not everything in the world of networking can tolerate a multi-second failover process without an observable blip in connectivity. As for redundant/HA storage, the CAP theorem called and asked to speak with you about your database, but I think you were on with physics at the time so I just took a message.
It's not just about whether the wastage due to more frequent failures works out cheaper economically than paying a premium for better hardware. It's also about how much downtime you (or your customers) are willing to tolerate and what proportion of overall system time is spent just recovering from failures. If you've ever had the joy of watching the (N+1)-th drive fail in your RAID with N-way redundancy while it's still rebuilding from replacing the earlier failures, you'll know what I mean.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.