Facebook open sources its servers and data centers

http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-open-sources-its-servers-and-data-centers/

by arithmetic • 15 years ago

530 98 15 years ago

yanw• 15 years ago

Not sure how many startups built their own servers anymore, this event seems like a response to the Greenpeace accusations of Facebook's environmental responsibility or wherever.

Edit: I agree it's a good thing, it's just that hosting a press event rather than just making the announcement through a blog post suggests other motives as well.

nroman• 15 years ago

This is true. However, the services that startups use to host their servers (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.) could adopt these practices in new datacenters because the specs are open. This could lower costs for the startups that use these services, and be good for the environment.

Seems like everyone wins.

vl• 15 years ago

Any large scale service already adopted such practices, may be not to the same degree. All large players buy custom hardware with specific tweaks to be more energy (read cost) efficient.

toddmorey• 15 years ago

"Graham Weston, the chairman of Rackspace, said that his company would use the new Open Compute servers in its own designs, and Zynga's chief technical officer said that his company would take a serious look at adding the new technology to its own cloud." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383257,00.asp

flyt4• 15 years ago

This isn't a response to Greenpeace, this is a response to the real costs that it takes to run compute infrastructure at the scale of Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

If a datacenter can run at 1.07 PUE (as Facebook's new datacenter does), then it directly translates to massive power cost savings. Environmental efficiency just comes along with it.

kragen• 15 years ago

Okay, but why does it benefit Facebook's bottom line (and Google's!) to open-source that stuff? Wouldn't they be better off if their competitors had to pay those higher costs? It's not as if they have substantial computation-service providers they're buying from, or data-center-oriented companies they're selling to.

kellysutton• 15 years ago

blip.tv builds and maintains our own servers and data centers. We started before the Cloud though :)

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

Correction. You created the Cloud.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

The question comes up a lot when you're building very large scale applications. When does it make sense to have your own infrastructure vs using someone else's (like Amazon's).

If you're running 'one' thing (like say a hadoop farm) and you can optimize out the things you don't need, there can be a pretty durable benefit in building your own machines.

People like Rackable, HP, Dell, or IBM who sell servers need to build them able to do 'anything' you might want, in order to do that cost effectively they often put things on the mother board (lowest marginal cost) which are perhaps not useful in all cases. However, when you're using lots of machines you have to power and cool those unused sound chips and USB hub chips, and may firewire ports that aren't really all that useful to a web app.

I talk about it as 'rack level' blades, basically motherboards on a cookie sheet that only have network and storage interfaces. Taking away a size constraint makes building them a lot easier (you don't need a custom backplane for example, you just plug cables in)

newmediaclay• 15 years ago

The only other motive it suggests is garnering as much publicity for their innovation/company as they can. Facebook is notorious for being able to magnify a small announcement into a big event and reap the dividends -- remember the announcement of a redesign via 60 minutes? If you can get media and influences to come pay attention to cool stuff you're doing, why wouldn't you?

amitraman1• 15 years ago

Wow.

whakojacko• 15 years ago

Link to an article in James Hamilton's blog with actual pdfs of various designs: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/04/07/OpenComputeProje...

wmf6• 15 years ago

As much as I like James and his commentary, I have this thing about primary sources: http://opencompute.org/

flyt4• 15 years ago

Get all the CAD files and other specifications here: http://opencompute.org

swah• 15 years ago

Any idea on how much would it cost to produce a small quantity of those boards? At which scale does it starts to make sense to use a custom made motherboard instead of a off-the-shelf PC?

flyt4• 15 years ago

HP, Dell and other vendors are already showing off hardware built to the new specifications: http://instagr.am/p/C66FU/

wmf6• 15 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is that one rack holds 90 servers and each battery rack feeds 180 servers, so (at least in Facebook's case) that's the basic unit. If this stuff takes off I would expect someone to produce a smaller 30-slot rack, though.

sundars• 15 years ago

One of the most important fact form this article which is likely to be overlooked is : "the Prineville facility runs at 85°F with a 65 percent relative humidity". Running at such a high humidity + Temp combination is impressive esp when you look at the money saved in environmental costs.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

That quote made it seem like the incoming air was at 65% relative humidity, but...

"which in turns lets Facebook rely on evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning."

So it runs at 65% relative humidity after the swamp coolers.

I doubt this would be possible in datacenters in more tropical environments (south Florida). Thoughts?

beagledude• 15 years ago

say what you want about Facebook but I give them props for open sourcing so much code to the community. Cassandra, Thrift, Scribe,Hive, etc...

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

A list of Facebook's open-sourced applications and their major contributions to other open-source projects can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

lrcg3• 15 years ago

"Please take a look, tell us what we did wrong and join us in working together to make every data center more efficient."

Mad Props.

skeletonjelly• 15 years ago

Indeed. This is how I want to see society. Sharing knowledge for the greater good. Probably the reason I'm not a fan of detriments of this such as software patents and Apple in general.

tallanvor• 15 years ago

I'm sure they've done a lot of tests, but running servers in an environment with 65% humidity just doesn't sound good for them.

ceejayoz2• 15 years ago

> In August 2008, Intel conducted a 10-month study to assess the effectiveness of using only outside air to cool a data center. The temperature range was 64°F to 92°F. Humidity varied from 4% to over 90% and changed rapidly at times. No increase in server failure was observed.

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.datacenter_e...

ams6110• 15 years ago

I don't know whether 65% humidity is going to hurt a server, but evaporative cooling doesn't work well if the relative humidity is high. So maybe it's a good idea in dry climates, but I can't see it being very effective in the midwest of the US in July/August.

delinka• 15 years ago

A certain amount of humidity helps to prevent issues with static electricity. And unless you're pouring water directly across electrical components, there's really not a problem.

joblessjunkie• 15 years ago

But it's great for all those plants they have hidden behind the false rack fronts.

michaelbuckbee• 15 years ago

I'd be very interested in hearing from someone with more experience in running their own hardware what portions (if any) of what Facebook has announced today is applicable at the small scale of say having a couple of co-located racks in some datacenter. Maybe the base server designs?

rhizome• 15 years ago

I'd say it's more of a refinement than something new. I haven't looked at much more than what they're saying in the video, but it boils down to:

- new featureset mobos: stripped down, no parallel ports among other things I'm sure. there looked to be some SATA/Mini-USB type sockets. - fancy new power supplies - the triple racks don't seem to be anything special at face value, convenient maybe, but with the power features above two of these triple racks are serviced by one battery rack. So, you'd need, oh, 400+ servers to take full advantage at this level.

NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?

- Fancy power distribution and cabling and stuff, mostly part of the racks, possibly involving wacky connectors on the compute side. For smaller operations this would be like having a 60-outlet power strip.

- 95% efficient from plug to party-time. This helps with the bills.

- Using the room/building as the cooling mechanism. While this has likely been done before in some manner (at least an intentional use of stack-effect in HVAC), that weird slot that one of the boxes gets pushed into makes me think they have some kind of sealed thingy from floor to ceiling that interfaces with the racks, basically using the building cooling to push in and suck out air forced through the racks. at a basic level it's all about CFMs, after all. This could also be done with forced current from front to back, or vice versa.

whatever is going on here, you first have to get to the "your own server room" part of business. this can be had at smaller companies, too, but for the room-cool ducting you'd need to cut into walls and stuff in the server room to pipe that stuff in. Spendy.

So, this leaves the smalltimer to save $15 on their monthly power bill by using new rack servers that don't need or have an NVidia GeForce 9000+ and 10-drive RAID. Stripped down BIOS and maybe no more IDE support, that kind of thing. Hot Rod rack servers of the skeleton/pure-compute variety, not the AlienWare one.

cft• 15 years ago

I can give you an interesting data point: our power bill is only about $600/mo (2.5KWh), our bandwidth bill is about $3,500/mo (1.2Gbps). So power is a smaller consideration.

patrickgzill• 15 years ago

If you are in the USA, you are overpaying for bandwidth by about $700/month or so.

budwin• 15 years ago

This is a great talent acquisition play.

iloveponies2• 15 years ago

One thing I've found interesting: The decision to have batteries not per server like Google, or per data centre, but per group of racks.

Swannie2• 15 years ago

Pretty standard in telecoms. Never quite understood why Google went per server.

iloveponies2• 15 years ago

Their claims were that the efficiency was that great, and that it's acceptable to pay the extra few dollars in motherboard manufacture to build it in.

corin_• 15 years ago

  Sorry ARM.

Have ARM actually done more than announce that they will be moving into servers? If they have then I missed the announcement. Either way, seems like a fairly stupid dig at ARM, can't really expect companies like Facebook to have moved onto ARM servers this quickly, even if it is the direction they intend to go in.

steevdave2• 15 years ago

No they haven't. The closest you would come would be a tegra2 which is dual core and I believe the omap4 is dual core as well. Though iirc, you can't currently use both cores in Linux. Freescale have announced the imx6 which should have quad, dual and single cores but availability won't be until q4 (though they are pushing hard to get it before then I think.) You still are currently limited with ram on an ARM machine which I think is the biggest hinderance to going in to servers. Presently almost all server software works on an ARM machine with a few exceptions like spidermonkey (so no running Launchpad) but plenty of people use them as personal servers.

wmf6• 15 years ago

This "sorry ARM" stuff is mostly just the media's need to turn every story into a horse race. But there is some technical detail here: Facebook said they're not ever willing to use 32-bit and ARM won't have 64-bit for years. Also notice that Facebook's servers are "conventional" 2-socket with lots of DIMM slots, not 1-socket "microservers".

steevdave2• 15 years ago

Fwiw, Freescale has a 64bit ppc processor now... Either way though, until you're able to just drop an ARM processor into a "commodity" motherboard, it won't really see widespread use, aside from cell phones, and other mobile devices. There is also the fact that ARM processors all seem to have the graphics card embedded in the chip.

razzmataz2• 15 years ago

I am curious if they would ever look into loongson. It's 64bit and fairly power efficient.

lrcg3• 15 years ago

Ethernet-powered LED lighting :D

oasisbob• 15 years ago

I found that interesting too, thought it was a joke at first.

The only details I was able to dig up are in the Data Center specs [1], and they're pretty brief:

> Energy-efficient LED lighting is used throughout the data center interior. / Innovative power over Ethernet LED lighting system. / Each fixture has an occupancy sensor with manual override. / Programmable alerts via flashing LEDs.

I wondered what the justification for PoE lighting could possibly be, sounds like all the lighting is also functional as instrumentation.

Anyone know more?

[1] http://opencompute.org/specs/Open_Compute_Project_Data_Cente...

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

A couple of guesses. They probably have a lot more cat5/cat6 around than 3-conductor 12 gauge copper wire (not sure if it is cheaper by the foot).

Also, the network switches can output the PoE, so maybe it is easier to wire into/from the racks or overhead than a seperate AC line with conduit.

Labor installation and material costs may be less.

Also, since it is DC, and not an AC lighting source, interference may be less (just a guess).

And as you mentioned, the lighting as instrumentation.

davidpitkin• 15 years ago

Facebooks attempts at openness make me wonder what they are trying to hide... misdirection?

nanexcool• 15 years ago

Are you serious? Facebook open sources so much of their code.

Check http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

ceejayoz2• 15 years ago

Each server rack sits atop the shallow grave of a HN commenter who said something bad about Facebook.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

I don't get the AC PSUs on the servers (http://opencompute.org/servers/). Any reason why those are being used when each 6-rack group has a UPS (and batteries) connected to them? Going DC would get rid of the inverter on the UPS out and the 200 or so PSUs on each server.

lrcg3• 15 years ago

The UPS doesn't need an inverter - the PSUs have a DC in.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

But they are supposed to use the AC input when not running off the UPS. I wonder why that would be a good idea.

dhess• 15 years ago

I'm also puzzled why they don't go all-DC. This thread doesn't appear to be getting any traction here. Is there a HN for datacenter geeks?

daveman692• 15 years ago

Amir Michael who worked on the hardware team said, "The utility provides us with AC voltage which we then convert to DC very close to the motherboard in the power supply. Our goal was to bring the high voltage as close as possible to the load to minimize IR losses. We could do an efficient AC –DC conversion in the rack and then distribute DC to the individual servers but that would mean several feet of low voltage conductors which would be made from large copper bars and a would have higher IR losses."

skorgu• 15 years ago

What are the chances of these being commercially available anytime soon? Is a single consumer (even if it's facebook-sized) enough to jumpstart a B2C supply chain? It's hard to see this catching on with anyone not building green field unless it can come in at least on-par with a Dell/HP/Supermicro quote.

ignifero• 15 years ago

Shall we expect Google, Amazon, Microsoft et. al. to start posting their energy efficiency stats from tomorrow?

wmf6• 15 years ago

Way ahead of you: http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenter/efficiency-measur...

Flenser• 15 years ago

Looked through Google's numbers but they don't seem to be directly comparable to Facebook's. Anyone know how far apart they are?

codex• 15 years ago

This is a strategic attack on Google. A proliferation of scalable data centers hurts Google a lot more than Facebook by enabling Google's competitors. Cheap computation matters much more to search engines than social networking sites.

db42• 15 years ago

That is a good point, that you have raised. But I wonder, why well established companies like microsoft, apple etc. are not doing this.

datums• 15 years ago

They are. http://goo.gl/RPgs2. It's not new.

diegob2• 15 years ago

A proliferation of scalable data centers could also enable the next generation of social networking sites ... I don't see why it's limited to helping Google's competitors and not Facebook's.

whatusername• 15 years ago

Becuase Search is ultimately about technology, but Social is about the users.

If I was the only user of Google (and they had the same technology stack) then +1 aside - my experience would be the same as it is now. If I was the only user of facebook - what would be the point.

ssp• 15 years ago

It could be. I always thought that an interesting way to compete with Google would be to index the web and then sell map/reduce access to that index.

neilk2• 15 years ago

Because Google could never benefit from Facebook's designs too? Google does a lot of things bespoke, but now they have a model to compare with that is using more off-the-shelf tech. That can only help them in the buy-vs-build decision process.

I think you're going overboard in thinking that everything the big players do is about killing the other guy. Sometimes they just want to reduce costs. If you decide that part of your infrastructure isn't strategic to own, it always makes sense to be open.

brownleej• 15 years ago

I'd say that efficient data servers are one of google's core competencies. Google does not benefit from having that commoditized.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

Ah, economies of scale, is there anything you can't improve?

Facebook open sources its servers and data centers

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