On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 09:57:44PM -0400, Ryan wrote: > Did anyone see the Facebook announcement and Open Compute Project? > > http://opencompute.org/ > > I'm curious if you that are more experience have any thoughts on it.
As for the servers themselves? they look a lot like supermicro boards in cheap custom chassis; KingStarUSA - the supermicro reseller below my office will sell me 'shelf' racks for cheap, and at sub-rack volumes, if you want to go through the effort of assembling your own from parts, you can save the sheetmetal cost by using used chassis. I mean, for what I do, there is no substitute for a good hot-swap backplane, meaning Velcro is not a substitute. For me, the hot swap backplane is worth the money. Next, as others have pointed out, the big win here, data center cooling, really can only be brought to bear when you are at datacenter scale. I'm at what, 190 amps or so? way below data center scale. Even at scale, I have a lot of questions before I would switch my gear to evaporative cooling. I mean, it sounds really good; not only do you get almost free cooling, humid air can actually carry more heat out of the servers than dry air can, so potentially I could get the same cooling effect with hotter air. But what about condensation? I mean, I don't really know enough to say either way, but just 'cause facebook does it that doesn't mean that it'd work well for me. I'd need to do a lot of research about what happens the cold morning after a hot day. I mean, I'd assume that you'd cut the evaporative cooling when the temperature started falling, but it still sounds pretty iffy to me. google and facebook have requirements for data center reliability that are, ah, quite a bit different from most of us further down the food chain. My understanding is that google has some data centers that simply run on outside air with no provision (other than just shutting the whole damn thing down and routing traffic elsewhere) for days when outside air is too hot to use. It seems like facebook could also do the same. Even amazon's SLA tends to focus more on the ability to bring up new nodes rather than saying anything about the longevity of your existing nodes. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
