Facebook's new Open Compute V2 servers

Now that Intel and AMD have finally launched their respective Xeon E5-5600 and Opteron 6200 processors for two-socket servers, the Open Compute Project, a foundation created by Facebook to open source its data center technologies, can finally divulge the feeds and speeds of the Open Compute V2 machines. That's precisely what …

[Anonymous Coward]

As solid a financial decision as buying Instagram

facebook is always reinventing the wheel with their open data center stuff. Why would you want to build your own two socket servers? How much time and money goes into sourcing, manufacturing, stocking parts, engineering designs, etc when they could just go out an buy a whole bunch of customized two sockets from the vendor of their choice. I am sure they would build any spec facebook wanted if they committed to a 10,000 unit order. Google and facebook will be burying their own fiber all over the world soon so they can have the pleasure of wrapping the cables.... It would be nice if these guys used their crazy wealth and engineering talent to build something new instead of a two socket server, we already have that covered.

[Giles Jones]

Re: As solid a financial decision as buying Instagram

When has Facebook created anything new? most social networks owe a lot to journal sites like Livejournal. All Facebook did was create a view that lets you see all your friends updates in one big list., Livejournal required you to view each person's journal individually.

Their site may work slick and easy to use but it's pretty much the Microsoft approach, watch what everyone else does then fix all their problems. It's probably why Microsoft invested in Facebook.

[JDX]

Why would you want to build your own two socket servers?

If you need enough, it can make sense to design your own. I don't know how many that number is or how many FB need but I wouldn't be surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As solid a financial decision as buying Instagram

1 economies of scale, plus working w intel, these new form factors can be resold so no real hit.

2 if these designs are more efficient, cost savings in terms of energy savings from cooling and longer life components will pay for themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As solid a financial decision as buying Instagram

They haven't developed a two socket server, they've developed a four socket server in a 1.5U chassis - 0.75U per server...

[Bernard]

Inventing something new isn't really what big companies do after becoming big. It's actually Google's vast and diverse efforts to 'create something new' with Wave, Labs etc. which has sunk a lot of money and slightly taken the shine off their Amazing Moneymaking Machine (TM).

Innovation, on the other hand, is both something big companies can and should do well and something that's extremely valuable. It may not be as sexy to shave 10% off the resource requirements to build a server or the energy requirements to power and cool it but given the scale of and growth in modern computing requirements its a vital necessity both economically and ecologically.

Whether Facebook are any good at it I'm not qualified to say, but to doubt the value of the principle is to misunderstand that at least 95% of the world's research and development is well spent making things better rather than trying to invent new types of things.

It's why we're not driving around in Model Ts, playing Pong or working with 640K of RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Whether Facebook are any good at it I'm not qualified to say, but to doubt the value of the principle is to misunderstand that at least 95% of the world's research and development is well spent making things better rather than trying to invent new types of things.

>It's why we're not driving around in Model Ts, playing Pong or working with 640K of RAM.

It's also why AOL effectively no longer exists - because they got mixed up in things way beyond their competence when they couldn't even get a handle on their existing technology.

Facebook is the same - their software platform is a proprietary mess, and every time someone changes something, it breaks something else.

They've also dumbed down the internet to an extent nobody imagined would be possible.

They truly are the new AOL.

[Mr Anonymous]

So that's exactly the same memory capacity in about the same space as an HP blade, revolutionary.

[E 2]

Am I missing the point here?

Supermicro resellers have been offering me dual mobo, dual socket machines in a 1U package for at least a year. This Facebook system looks the same but 1.5U, thus a lesser product.

[steven W. Scott]

Awesome!

not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tinkering

fb and Google like to tinker with these things. They seem to be unaware of the economic concepts of comparative or even absolute advantage. Maybe they can build a server that is marginally more efficient than HP or IBM can build for their purposes. Maybe they can do it at a lower cost, although I think it is extremely unlikely as they do not have the volumes, automated manufacturing or quality processes, or the ability to spread the costs of their design, manufacture and maintenance work over 100,000s of customers.... It doesn't make any business sense, but they have the cash to mess around and they seem to enjoy it, so they are messing around. They would be better suited to put the engineers on projects related to their web services.

[Anonymous Coward]

> They would be better suited to put the engineers on projects related to their web services.

They would be better suited to letting the engineers go home at evenings and weekends, make friends off 'campus', get wives and lives, and therefore be able to get some clue that the technology they are inventing has social implications (some of which may not be very desirable or healthy), rather than it just being 'cool'.