Facebook Open Sources Almost Everything About Its Servers, Data Centers

From DailyTech: When one in six people in the world are subscribed to your service and half of those access it on a daily basis, you're in a pretty unique position. Or more aptly, your name is probably Facebook. The mega social network has been the topic of much scrutiny -- and even a Hollywood movie -- but it's doing something now that might surprise its critics and supporters alike; it's sharing its secrets.

When a business cooks up a model for success, it typically keeps it close to its chest. Take Google. For all its talk of "not being evil" and being open Google has released precious little about how it is accomplishing massive energy saving at is data centers.

But Facebook today announced [press release] a massive contribution to the Open Compute Project -- a wealth of information on how it has designed industry-leading servers and data centers capable of handling the hundreds of millions of users who daily ping its site.

The announcement starts with the servers themselves. They're 50 percent taller than typical rack mounted servers (1.5U v. 1U). That extra space allows for bigger fans, but there's fewer of them. The fan system by Rackable (now SGI) require approximately 2 to 4 percent of the power budget, versus normal fans, which require 10 to 20 percent.

The extra energy is applied directly to the data center's intended purpose -- processing data from internet requests. The super-servers come in two flavors. The first is a design based on Magny-Cours 12 and 8 core CPUs, chips from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) That build features the AMD SR5650 chipset for I/O, and supports up to a maximum 192GB of memory. The second uses two Intel Corp. (INTC) Xeon 5500 series or 5600 series processors, up to 144GB memory, and an Intel 5500 I/O Hub chip.

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