Facebook Opens Their Data Center Infrastructure 90
gnu let us know about Facebook releasing specifications for their data center infrastructure as an open hardware project. They've released detailed electrical and mechanical data for everything from the server motherboards to the data center power distribution system. Digging further reveals that the specifications are licensed under the new Open Web Foundation Agreement which appears to be an actual open license. The breadth of data released really is quite amazing.
Faceboook (Score:4, Interesting)
So open to our partners we'll even give them access to the servers themselves to poke around in your personal info directly.
On a serious note, the data center is pretty cool. Here's another source of pretty blue images that show better images regarding the evaporation cooling system.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37295/?a=f [technologyreview.com]
You might have to 'skip' a couple HP ads but after about 2 or 3 they get the message that you're not interested.
Re:Finally, no video system on a server (Score:4, Interesting)
Server video cards embedded on motherboard don't use the system ram, they have an embedded 8 to 128 MB memory chip. Sure, they have a tiny frame buffer in the system ram but there are other things using more system memory than that frame buffer.
As for power usage, such plain vga video card embedded on the motherboard uses a couple of watts on idle - the chip doesn't even need a heatsink so it's not really a power saving feature if you remove it.
You would be saving much more power by using a power supply with high efficiency and wattage close to the actual server usage, instead of using (optionally redundant) 500-800 watts server power supplies.
Seriously, complaining about a few watts... some 1U servers have at least 4 x 40 mm high speed fans inside, each using 2-5 watts of power (because they run at max speed all the time) and you're complaining about a couple of watts on a video card.