Facebook eyes low
The server room at Facebook's data centre in Prineville, Oregon. Photo: AP
Facebook's hardware whiz in charge of revolutionising data centres lauded low-energy server technology which is expected to compete against heavyweight Intel.
Speaking at a conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, Open Compute Project head Frank Frankovsky said Facebook's three-year push to help companies design better data centre gear was gaining momentum and paying off with a range of cost-saving improvements.
He pointed to plans by a handful of companies to launch server chips based on low-power technology licensed from ARM, whose technology is widely used in smartphones.
'It might be coming to fruition about six months after the most optimistic among us thought, but we are absolutely going to see a much more rich ecosystem in CPU choice as we move through 2014 and into 2015,' said Frankovsky.
Intel dominates the server market with its powerful Xeon processors and stands to lose if server chips based on a rival architecture catch on. Intel has launched its own low-power chips in anticipation of a move toward microservers by major internet players such as Facebook and Google.
Struggling with a shrinking PC industry, chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has been developing and testing ARM-based chips for servers. Sunnyvale, California-based Applied Micro Circuits is also launching its own ARM-based server processors.
For some kinds of data-centre workloads, several low-power chips working together can work more efficiently than one of Intel's brawny server chips, proponents of microservers say.
With off-the-shelf data centre products falling behind Facebook's growing technical requirements, the world's top social media network in 2011 launched the Open Compute Project to push major technology companies to design and build hardware better-suited to running massive-scale Internet services.
Over the past three years, efforts by Facebook to make its infrastructure more efficient have saved the company over $US1.2 billion, said Jay Parikh, vice-president of infrastructure.
Its collaborative approach, with Facebook sharing its data centre standards and asking partners to improve on them, is inspired by open source software projects like Linux, where developers from different companies contribute and share improvements.
Microsoft, a New Open Compute member and technology heavyweight not traditionally known for sharing its expertise, has contributed cloud-server specifications that it says significantly reduce costs, as well as source code.
Since it started, the project has focused on improved standards for information storage, power supply, hardware racks and other data-centre components.
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