12 ms·
Facebook announces next-generation Open Rack frame
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoThis strikes me as a gigantic coordinated form of commoditize your complement.
- noir_lord 8y agoMakes sense but has nice second order effects. If we could standardise more we can optimise for power efficiency, things like more DC in DCs
- baybal2 8y agoFIY, the original telecom rack equipment been standardised on 48V since time immemorial. So, at 48V you can simply use off the shelf telecom power supplies
- StudentStuff 8y agoI've been trying to find cheap 48v power supplies for 1A and less telcom gear, but they seem to be pretty spendy. Cheaper to buy old gear that includes the PSU than order the PSU itself.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoActually it seems to me that standardization hampers the last bit of efficiency. Just one example that grinds my gears is the LEDs on the reference designs. Nobody needs these but there they are, drawing current 24x7 in a dark warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
- remarkEon 8y agoCan’t they just be turned off after power-on, or flipped on as needed?
- kayhi 8y agohow so? like commoditizing Oracle databases?
- walrus01 8y agoDC power wise, the original reason why they did this is that it's grossly inefficient to have a 42RU worth of 1U servers, each with its own individual 110-240VAC to 12/5VDC power supply in it. Or the equivalent of that with four-servers-in-2RU type setups, but also with AC to DC power supplies. They centralized the AC to DC conversion in a single unit in the rack, feeding either 277VAC or 480VAC to each rack, and ran 12VDC to each server. The new system wisely moves from 12VDC to 48VDC (same as most telecom equipment), and probably has basic DC-DC converters in each server unit for 48 to 12VDC conversion. They've also gone with custom motherboards that entirely eliminate the 5VDC rails which are distributed by 'normal' ATX server power supplies.
- baybal2 8y agoThere are 90%+ efficient reasonably cheap flex psus, but the mainstream is around 80%. So, you would not be saving much if you only have access to 110 or 220 mains. The economy changes though if you can get access to industrial 3 phase linkup at 400V, and can avoid additional low step down transformers.
- bigbangchina 8y agoYou can use microwave oven transformer to step to 1000VDC then simply use step down converter in each rack. I am doing this for my home lab with 100 servers.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> So, you would not be saving much if you only have access to 110 or 220 mains. "Much" is a relative term here, no? Like, doesn't that kind of depend at the scale at which Facebook operates?
- detaro 8y agoI read somewhere that part of it was also doing the short-term battery backup on a rack-level, without needing conversion back to mains AC and then again back to DC in the server for it.
- altmind 8y ago
- meruru 8y ago>commoditize your complement You talk like that's a well-known concept, but as far as I know it has been coined only one year ago in this essay: https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- 0815test 8y agoIt was described in detail much earlier than that, in ESR's The Magic Cauldron, part of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: "...When the development of the open-source X window system was funded by DEC in the 1980s, their explicit goal was to 'reset the competition'. At the time there were several competing alternative graphics environments for Unix in play, notably including Sun Microsystems's NeWS system. DEC strategists believed (probably correctly) that if Sun were able to establish a proprietary graphics standard it would get a lock on the booming Unix-workstation market. By funding X and lending it engineers, and by allying with many smaller vendors to establish X as a de-facto standard, DEC was able to neutralize advantages held by Sun and other competitors with more in-house expertise in graphics. This moved the focus of competition in the workstation market towards hardware, where DEC was historically strong. ..." from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s11.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cau...
- codetrotter 8y agoThe essay you linked attributes the concept to Joel Spolsky, saying that he wrote about it in 2002 and quoting from that. So the concept was coined quite long ago.
- meruru 8y agoThe idea is old, but I didn't think people were referring to it by name before. Searching for "commoditize your complement" I get first recent results discussing the essay I linked, though digging deeper there are quite a few linking to the Spolsky post as well.
- baybal2 8y agoI wonder, when will facebook's hardware people start using their own inventions? I see them and other dotcoms pouring inordinate amount of money designing own hardware without actually manufacturing or using anything of it. As I know, facebook still buys very plain OEM servers from Quanta
- jauer 8y agowithout actually manufacturing or using anything of it. As I know, facebook still buys very plain OEM servers from Quanta This is false, as you can see from publicly available pictures of FB datacenters. Facebook purchases OCP servers from ODMs.
- vernie 8y agoODMs or OEMs?
- btashton 8y agoODM - Original Design Manufacturer, the specifications and some design work is done by FB and then this company goes and actually designs and builds the equipment that FB buys.
- Twirrim 8y agoODMs = System Integrators, if you're familiar with that term instead? There's several companies that will do large scale bespoke-design server manufacturing and assembly work. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al. all order servers through them that are built to specifications their hardware engineers have designed (usually in collaboration with them). Once you get above a certain scale, the value proposition of OEMs goes out the window.
- electrum 8y agoFacebook does use it. They design their own hardware, but they are do not manufacture it themselves, they aren't in the hardware manufacturing business. They parter with companies like Quanta to do that. Here's an older article that explains the relationship: https://venturebeat.com/2014/01/29/facebook-quanta/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/01/29/facebook-quanta/
- dana321 8y agoThe sooner this centralized model of storing data ends, the better.
- Twirrim 8y agoWhat does that have to do with an open specification for racks of computers? This is a design that anyone could potentially adopt, and gain from the engineering efforts that those involved in OCP have done. There's even a marketplace you can purchase Open Rack components through (and you could likely also go more direct to those companies rather than via OCP's marketplace): https://www.opencompute.org/products https://www.opencompute.org/products
- acd 8y agoCould ocp make a rack that behaves like a blade server? Construct a server rack that works like a network Patch panel and server power bus? Thus one would just install the server in the rack slot, no more Cables to the server. Bonus award if a robot could slide in the server in the rack.
- zamadatix 8y agoYou'd either need a different rack design per particular server or a rack that is overdesigned for 99% of servers plugged into it (e.g. different speeds/counts of network connections). If the thought is the servers will be static for the lifetime of the rack does wiring up a preset rack to a switch really save any time from wiring up preset server designs to a switch? I think it's probably best kept modular.
- ajdecon 8y agoThere are rack designs out there built on this idea, but they are usually pretty specialized. For example, the Cray XC series has racks with built in power, network, and out of band monitoring. A downside of this kind of thing is that it makes upgrades and maintenance harder, and you often have to do any hardware work on a whole rack at once. Heterogeneous setups get really hard. And it’s usually very vendor specific.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoWhat’s the current industry practice for blades? Does AWS GCP, Azure use them?