Hacker story: 12 months to create a Facebook open source server

Introduction: Facebook is helping internet companies remove expensive and unnecessary components to reduce costs, redesign power supplies, motherboards and cooling systems, and share them with everyone, from open source servers to data centers until just announced open source storage solutions. Wired correspondent Cade Metz, who interviewed Facebook's system engineering manager Amir Michael, gave us a picture of the birth of the Facebook open source server and data center. It's hard to imagine that Michael and his team have done it in just 12 months. The following are full text translations:

Amir Michael in Faceobook's server lab

Amir Michael Works on Facebook, and as a hacker, there's nothing to be surprised about. But he is not a traditional software hacker, but a hardware hacker--in the mailroom as a makeshift lab.

By the end of 2010, Facebook no longer received any goods at the Palo Alto's headquarters pier. Michael and several other engineers poured in, as they needed to build a larger server lab, which they had built in the next room.

Here used to be the shipping dock, and there was a huge ruler on the floor. Sometimes this huge ruler is used to weigh the parcel. When Michael and his team moved in, the rods were used to measure the servers that were made from scratch. 12 months later, they completed the server designed for the Prineville datacenter, one on the ruler. He put it down, the server has been mass-produced and used around the world.

Michael made a 10-pound server.

Like other internet giants, Facebook has provided a large number of data center networks and servers for his Internet empire, with huge amounts of money. If you want to provide Web pages for billions of users, you need to spend a lot of money, not just to buy hardware, but to provide power to these hardware. In a way, you really spend too much money. You need something different from anything in the world.

In the spring of 2009, Facebook recruited Michael to help the company improve its efficiency. "My supervisor and I said: ' Hey, come on, we have a lot of architecture to build, and we're going to do a lot of innovation, more economic and more energy efficiency '," Michael recalls. "I asked if there was any specific goal?" He said: ' No. Why not join us and find it? So Michael did it.

To keep Facebook's world-renowned "hacker culture," he began with a blank floor, using everything that was within reach, building the Facebook it store and the next door receipt "Dock" at the speed of engineers. The result is a new server that is more efficient, more economical, and more productive in appearance (physically).

"In order to optimize costs, we took away many of the components of the standard server," said Michael, "which makes it easier to repair." With a lot less blocking, the heat dissipation becomes more efficient. and 10 pounds lighter: This allows us to buy less than 10 pounds, and any time we put it in or out of the rack to make it easier, and finally to scrap the day, also less than 10 pounds recycled. ”

Facebook does not design its own servers alone. Google has been involved for several years. The difference is that Facebook will invite you to a temporary lab, see how they do it, and provide you with the server that Michael designed, even the blueprints for the Prineville data center, which you can use to concatenate these servers together.

The internet giants need efficient hardware to handle a wide variety of businesses. The same is true of financial institutions, biomedicine and other business organizations. Facebook wants to help and help them. With Michael and other Facebook hardware smart teams, they can work together.

In the mailroom, Michael unloaded the server from the rack.

(Responsible editor: Duqing first)