Change the data center Pattern Facebook Server Scheme interpretation

The 17th building at Facebook headquarters, located in the original park of Sun Microsystems, was dubbed the "Sun Quentin" for the shape of California State Quentin Prison (San Quentin). Now, working in the building is a Facebook engineer team at the Facebook Power Lab. In every working day, they are pushing the company's ideas about how data center hardware should be built. These engineers are constantly testing the design of Home-grown server hardware--basically, Facebook's Home-grown server hardware is quite different from the hardware we normally know.

Arctechnica recently visited Facebook's headquarters campus and toured the company's server labs under the leadership of Matt Caudri, a senior manager of Facebook's hardware engineering, and the head of the server hardware design team, Matt Corddry. What is happening in the Facebook lab is not just an impact on the company's data center, it is also one of the contributions that Facebook has made to open computing (Compute project). The purpose of this project is to bring open source design to the Global data center server and storage hardware, infrastructure and management interface.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google are all picky about their server hardware, which is mainly about making their own hardware by buying parts and then developing them in their own way. Frank Frankovsky, vice president of Facebook's hardware design and supply chain operations, has Frank Frankowski the open Computing project because he recognizes the waste that large cloud companies will have in the process of re-creation of what they can share. Frankowski feels that introducing the Open-source principles that Facebook has been following in the software world into the hardware sector will save a lot of money for the company and other companies-a savings that can be seen in two areas, one for direct hardware costs and the other for maintenance and power costs.

Just as Raspberry Pi and Arduino open source microcontrollers have inspired the imagination of small hardware hackers, the goal of the Open Computing project is to make DIY easier, more efficient and more flexible at the macro level. In the end, what Facebook and open computing projects are doing to datacenter hardware may not be the risk of extinction for the entire hardware industry, but it will certainly have a certain impact on the industry. Yes, open source, commercialized motherboards and other subsystems used for Facebook were originally designed for the "Super scale" data center world, such as Facebook, Rackspace and other data centers for cloud computing services providers; These designs can easily find roads to other DIY hardware environments, or paths to "vanity free" server systems that are sold not only to small companies but also to large enterprises.

The reason why open source hardware can quickly expand its reach and move from its initial audience to more users is because hardware vendors are free to adopt this hardware, driving down the price of new server systems. This may not be good news for HP, Cisco and other large companies in the IT sector. "No exaggeration", open source design of the server system is likely to promote the rapid development of innovation activities, so that HP and other companies have been on the development of the entire model has a devastating impact.