Facebook Shakes Hardware World With Own Storage Gear

Facebook already built its own data center and its own servers. And now the social-networking giant is building its own storage hardware — hardware for housing all the digital stuff uploaded by its more than 845 million users.

The web’s other leading players — including Google

Like the web’s other leading players — including Google and Amazon — Facebook runs an online operation that’s then beyond the scope of the average business, and that translates to unprecedented hardware costs — and hardware complications. If you’re housing 140 billion digital photos, you need a new breed of hardware.

When Facebook first introduced the project last spring, many saw it as a mere PR stunt. Nevertheless some big-name outfits — including some outside the web game — are already buying Open Compute servers. No less a name than Apple has taken interest in Facebook’s energy-conscious data-center design. And according to Frankovsky, fifty percent of the contributions to the project’s open source designs now come from outside Facebook.

For Peter Krey — who helped build a massive computing grid for one of Wall Street largest financial institutions and now advises the CIOs and CTOs of multiple Wall Street firms as they build “cloud” infrastructure inside their data centers — Facebook’s project is long overdue. During building that computing grid, Krey says, he and his colleagues would often ask certain “tier one” server sellers to strip proprietary hardware and unnecessary elements from their machines in order to conserve power and cost. However the answer was always no. “And we weren’t buying just a few servers,” he says. “We were buying thousands of servers.”

Effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol

Rackspace is leading an effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today’s servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, to illustrate, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. “DRAM doesn’t [change] as fast as CPUs,” Frankovsky says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could in fact disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?”

Frankovsky calls it “small stuff.” And that’s what it is. However if you’re running an operation that size of Facebook, that small stuff becomes very big really. In making one small change afterwards another, Facebook is overhauling its infrastructure. And in sharing its designs with the rest of the world, it hopes to overhaul much more.