The company announced on Tuesday that it would give away designs of two crucial elements of its enormous computing centers, both computer servers and networking. These designs and others like them will be offered as products from several other manufacturers, along with a significant amount of supporting software from other companies.
Facebook also noted that its designs had saved the company $2 billion in the last three years, compared with using conventional computing equipment.
If the new designs become popular, it could mean new pain for the large incumbent computer-hardware makers, like Cisco and Dell, which for several years have faced inroads from open-source software. The Facebook products involve both hardware and software.
A Facebook executive said much of the difference in the way Facebook designs computing systems comes from its huge data flows, both internally and from users on desktop computers and mobile phones. While few companies now handle Facebook-heft computation, expectations are for huge loads to become commonplace at many companies.
“It’s hardware that better fits the workloads and software,” said Jason Taylor, vice president of computer infrastructure at Facebook. “There are thousands of companies with these needs.” He said the new designs could be interesting to any company spending more than $10 million a year on computing — a not exceptional amount for a large company.
The two designs are being open-sourced through the Open Compute Project, which Mark Zuckerberg helped start to lower his costs and catch up with giants like Google and Amazon Web Services in building global computing infrastructures.
Open-source projects can help a company like Facebook in a couple of ways. In the design phase of a project, having outsiders examine work can mean unexpected improvements and bug fixes. If the product becomes successful, Facebook gets the benefits of lower prices from higher production.
“Supply chains get healthier if there is more demand,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s an advantage” for Facebook.
One of the products Facebook is donating to the Open Compute Project is a recently developed networking switch with a modular design that enables smaller switches to create larger ones. Switches are the way data moves between computer servers in a rack, and between the racks inside a data center.
Accton, a Taiwanese maker of networking gear, is expected to sell a version of the switch later this year. In addition, two other companies making switching software, Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks, are donating software to the project. Facebook is donating switch management software that it has developed.
The other Facebook donation is a new version of a low-power server that uses a special semiconductor from Intel. Up to 192 of the chips can be fit into a single rack of servers at relatively low power consumption but high performance.
Separately at the Open Compute meeting, Hewlett-Packard announced a new server it is producing in conjunction with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer that also builds products for Apple. HP and Foxconn entered a joint venture last year, aiming to sell low-priced servers to providers of telecommunications and Internet services. The design appears to use many Open Compute features.
HP has previously sold its own low-power servers, with mixed results.
In addition, a start-up called Vapor announced a new kind of data-center design that involved low-power systems to build smaller cloud systems. The chief executive, Cole Crawford, previously held an executive position in the Open Compute Foundation, which manages the Open Compute Project. In an interview, he described the new systems as ideal for aggregating and managing data for sensor-equipped devices in the Internet of Things, or for small businesses that want to build their own clouds.
Source: Bits
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