By Don Clark And Shira Ovide
Having reinvented friendship, Facebook Inc. is reconceiving the
computers that power large-scale Web operations. The company has
been pushing hardware manufacturers to improve their designs, and
on Tuesday unveiled a new style of server based on a collaboration
with Intel Corp.
Code-named Yosemite, the new system is a candidate to run the
software that acts as the social network's online front door, the
company said. But Facebook hopes other companies will adopt the
design as well.
Nearly all Web servers have sockets to accommodate two
microprocessor chips. Yosemite, by contrast, is built with four
small circuit boards that each sport one chip--a new variant on
Intel's popular Xeon product family. Facebook found the two-socket
design too bulky and power-hungry for many jobs and proposed
Yosemite as a more efficient alternative.
"This is a really, really nice building block for the future,"
Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of engineering, said in an
interview.
The Yosemite announcement was one of many at a gathering of the
Open Compute Project, a nonprofit group formed by Facebook in 2011
to adapt principles of open-source software to hardware. Members
develop and share designs for servers, networking gear and storage
devices that any company can build and sell, creating competition
that helps hold down hardware costs.
Such commodity-style systems frequently are associated with
lesser-known vendors in Taiwan and China, but OCP has pushed
better-known brands to change their tactics.
That includes Hewlett-Packard Co., the biggest seller of servers
based on the x86 chip design that Intel first popularized in
personal computers. H-P on Tuesday unveiled stripped-down servers
for cloud-style operations that were produced in a previously
announced joint venture with Taiwan's Foxconn, also known as Hon
Hai Precision Industry Co. Exact pricing wasn't disclosed, but H-P
executives made it clear that its new Cloudline machines would be
noticeably less expensive than its widely used Proliant line.
H-P's participation in the OCP was seen as an important step in
spreading innovations honed at places like Facebook to corporate
computing at large. "H-P's announcement today was pretty
phenomenal," said Don Duet, co-head of Goldman Sachs's technology
operation.
Mr. Duet said Goldman expects roughly 70% of its computer server
purchases this year to be Open Compute-style gear, up from about
30% in 2014. The big shift is that vendors have made it feasible
for customers like Goldman to buy the same type of equipment the
Internet giants use.
Dell Inc., meanwhile, used Tuesday's Open Compute summit to
discuss its plans to try to ease compatibility issues among
commodity-style networking devices. Most such devices use switching
chips from the likes of Broadcom Corp. or Mellanox Technologies
Ltd., which can have subtle differences, said Tom Burns, a Dell
vice president.
So Dell is letting developers use software called the Switch
Abstraction Interface that allows programs written for switches
powered by one chip to work on another, Mr. Burns said.
Besides lowering hardware costs, Facebook and other big Web
services want to buy hardware that helps them reduce energy
consumption. Thanks to OCP and related efforts, Mr. Parikh said,
Facebook saved enough energy in the past year to power nearly
80,000 homes.
Facebook concluded that the standard two-socket design wasted
computing resources in carrying out some tasks, Mr. Parikh said. So
it worked with Intel over 18 months on the new Yosemite design.
A key element is Intel's new Xeon Processor D, a chip with eight
separate calculating engines that can carry out as many as 16
instructions at once. Intel already offered comparable products in
its ultra-low-power Atom line. But Facebook needed more computing
power, said Jason Waxman, an Intel vice president. He said the new
Xeon is up to 3.4 times as fast as comparable chips based on Atom
technology.
Intel has good reason to be aggressive in open hardware. A
number of rivals are trying to attract big server buyers like
Facebook with chips based on designs from ARM Holdings PLC, the
mainstay of smartphones. International Business Machines Corp. also
is trying to push its Power chip architecture into the field.
Servers are "Intel's game to lose," said Roger Kay, an analyst
at Endpoint Technologies Associates who called Facebook's
endorsement a big win for the chip maker. "Xeon D is a real stake
in the ground that says to competitors, 'This is ours; you can't
have this.'"
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com and Shira Ovide at
shira.ovide@wsj.com
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