Facebook “Open Compute” Server tested by Anandtech

Facebook designed an AMD and an Intel motherboard - all manufactured by Quanta. Their main aim was to make more efficient and cheaper servers: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers which is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” The efficiency of the voltage regulators: 94%. Everything was removed, that was not absolutely necessary: the motherboards have no BMC, very few USB (2) and NIC ports (2), one expansion slot, and are headless (no videochip).

Facebook had 22 Million active users in the middle of 2007; fast forward to 2011 and the site now has 800 Million active users, with 400 million of them logging in every day. Facebook has grown exponentially, to say the least! To cope with this kind of exceptional growth and at the same time offer a reliable and cost effective service requires out of the box thinking. Typical high-end, brute force, ultra redundant software and hardware platforms (for example Oracle RAC databases running on top of a few IBM Power 795 systems) won’t do as they're too complicated, power hungry, and most importantly far too expensive for such extreme scaling. (quoting Anandtech)

"The AMD servers are mostly used as Memcached servers, as the four channels of AMD Magny-cours Opterons 6100 are capable of using 12 DIMMs per CPU, or 24 DIMMs in total. That works out to 384GB of caching memory."

It remains unclear, when or if that server hardware will be available for purchase - but it looks like there will be some cloud/datacenter providers jumping on the idea of the open compute servers, so it might be possible to rent them.

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