81–90 of 105 posts
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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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.
I'm sorry, but it seems like you're implying that search doesn't need users. Some of Google's ranking depends on analyzing search histories, so if you were the only user, the experience would be worse. That means that search is also about the users. Data center technology can benefit everybody, that's all I'm trying to say.
I disagree. At this point, I believe that because of how big google is and because of how profitable gaming google is, getting good results, I believe that more than half of the work of finding relevant search results is filtering out the people attempting to game the search engine.
I mean, it is /possible/ that the help they get from user's search histories outweighs the massive amount of effort spammers put in to making google suck, but I doubt it.
I bet that things are much easier for a new search engine while they are small enough that it's not worth much time and effort to game the results.
>Data center technology can benefit everybody, that's all I'm trying to say.
This is true, but I believe what other users are likely saying is that google probably alrealdy has something as good or better than this.
Personally, I won't get excited until someone starts building out co-location centers that have efficent cooling. Nearly all co-location centers use mixed air, and most end up keeping the place much cooler than required, and they pass on those costs to me.
The thing is, for anyone who is big enough to take advantage of their data center design, this isn't particularly new. I mean, it's great they are sharing the documentation of how they did it... but that mostly helps the little guys, and the little guys can't really take advantage of it... we're stuck in co-location centers, like I said, with antiquated cooling designs.
The chassis designs, on the other hand, might be great for the little guys. Hell, I am not that far away from enough scale to job out the chassis to a metal shop, and the design would be a pretty big part of that cost, that facebook just reduced to zero. Thanks!
But the power savings on the chassis are very small compared to the power savings on the cooling/data center design.
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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.
It's not about the fact that open sourcing this info affects their bottom line as much as it is about responsibly contributing to the progress and advancement of computing... however it should be noted that for years, google has been very secretive about all aspects of its internal DC designs. The fact they were making their own equipment, incorporating UPS functions in the power supplies of their servers, how they w…
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?
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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?
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.
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.
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Pretty standard in telecoms. Never quite understood why Google went per server.
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.
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I am curious if they would ever look into loongson. It's 64bit and fairly power efficient.
There are other MIPS licensees too.