Facebook keeps score of Serviceability and Operational Efficiency of Data Center Hardware

There is a short post on OCP by Charlie Manese, Facebook Hardware Design team on Serviceability and operational efficiency, so I will just put the whole thing up.

Know the guys at Google have this data, wonder who else does?

Facebook's perspective on serviceability and operational efficiency

Wednesday, October 09, 2013 · Posted by charlie at 8:09 AM

UPDATED - Webinar on October 24, 2013

By Charlie Manese, Facebook Hardware Design team

At Facebook, because of our scale, we require that solutions deployed in our data center be engineered for maximum operational efficiency and serviceability.

The data center team works closely with the hardware design team to ensure this. Our designs incorporate features such as front-of-rack serviceability, toolless repair operations, and simplicity.

We’ve completed time-in-motion studies, streamlined processes for inventory and repair, and have developed scorecards to that help us evaluate and compare different hardware solutions.

Below is a table of the time-to-repair comparison of different kinds of web servers that have been deployed in our environment:

 

If you're interested in learning more about how Facebook thinks about serviceability and operational efficiency, and you missed the original event, I'll be joining a Hyve webinar on October 24, 2013.

For more information on the event, please see  https://synnex.ilinc.com/perl/ilinc/lms/register.pl?activity_id=zvkkfkw&user_id=

Hope to see you there!

 

Tesla's Elon Musk claiming gas cars 5X likely to catch fire misses point, NHTSA TREAD Act haunts Auto industry

Elon Musk claims the Tesla is 5 times safer than gas cars.  I know a few data center folks who have bought a Tesla.

The head of electric car maker Tesla pushed back aggressively against claims that the company’s vehicles are a fire danger, saying that only 3 in 25,000 Teslas havecaught fire and that those incidents were the result of high speed impacts.

“It hurts to see articles that the car is unsafe… nothing could be further from truth,” said Elon Musk, noting that Teslas are five times less likely to catch fire than gas-powered cars, which produce hundreds of fire-related injuries every year.

Thanks to the Infamous Firestone Tread problems, there is the NHTSA TREAD act and just because the Tesla is safer than overall gas fires, doesn’t mean the TREAD act won’t kick in.

Here is a graphic of the process.  for an interactive click on the link.

IBM comments on buying Softlayer

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris has a post on IBM and the acquisition of Softlayer.

On buying SoftLayer for $2 billion

“[W]e bought a company. … I’ve bought 120 companies,” Mills said matter of factly, noting that in this case IBM realized it wasn’t capturing certain segments of the cloud market and wasn’t delivering certain capabilities that customers wanted. You can either build those capabilities or buy them, he added, and “at the end of the day you run out of money [to build everything].”

Mills did defend IBM’s cloud legacy, though, going back to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling IBM in 2006 and asking if it would help set up a web-accessible developer cloud “because we had dynamic provisioning and scheduling technology and they did not.”

Too funny, Privacy Int'l thinks the NSA can track phones that are turned off

Battery life is the main thing that defines the user experience.  In the old days, there may have been phones that used power when off, draining the battery.  In the highly competitive world of smartphones who would drain the battery now?

Arstechnica has a post that Privacy int’l is asking manufacturers how the NSA can track their phones when powered off.  This is funny that someone actually thinks the phones are still connected.

Back in July 2013, The Washington Post reported that nearly a decade ago, the National Security Agency developed a new technique that allowed spooks to “find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this ‘The Find,’ and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.”

Many security researchers scratched their heads trying to figure out how this could be so. The British watchdog group Privacy International took it upon itself to ask eight major mobile phone manufacturers if and how this was possible in August 2013. On Monday, the group published replies from the four firms that have responded thus far: Ericsson, Google, Nokia, and Samsung. (Apple, HTC, Microsoft, and BlackBerry have not yet sent in a response.)

A research officer at the organization, Richard Tynan, wrote that “two themes stood out among the companies that replied: hardware manufacturers claim that they strive to switch off almost all their components while the phone is powered down, and if tracking occurs it is likely due to the installation of malware onto the phone.” Here are a few of the responses:

According to Tynan, Google responded:

When a mobile device running the Android Operating System is powered off, there is no part of the Operating System that remains on or emits a signal. Google has no way to turn on a device remotely.

Samsung Vice President Hyunjoon Kim noted that “without the power source it is not possible to transmit any signal, due to the components being inactive. Thus the powered off devices are not able to be tracked or monitored by any third party.” Meanwhile, Nokia’s Vice President and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Chad Fentress said:

Our devices are designed so that when they are switched off, the radio transceivers within the devices should be powered off. We are not aware of any way they could be re-activated until the user switches the device on again. We believe that this means that the device could not be tracked in the manner suggested in the article you referenced.

 

Open Network Switch is closer to ship, news from Open Compute Project

Open Compute Project’s president Frank Frankovsky posted on the progress of the Open Network Switch.

Progress in opening up the network

Monday, November 11, 2013 · Posted by Frank Frankovsky, chairman and president of the Open Compute Project Foundation at 11:20 AM

Just six months ago, we announced our intention to expand the charter of the Open Compute Project to include networking hardware.

At the time, it was our hope that we could build on the momentum we'd established in opening up server, storage, and datacenter designs and collaborate with the broader community on the development of an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch. Such a switch, we believed, would enable a faster pace of innovation in the development of networking hardware; help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish; and ultimately provide consumers of these technologies with the freedom they need to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and efficient across the entire stack.

Our progress so far has exceeded even our lofty expectations -- hundreds of people are actively collaborating on the development of more than 30 potential contributions, covering most of the network hardware stack and even some of the network software stack.

 Arstechnica adds in the threat this has to Cisco.

Six months ago, Facebook announced that its Open Compute Project (OCP) would develop a top-of-rack switch that could boot nearly any type of networking software. With the help of Intel, Broadcom, and others, the consortium devoted to open hardware specifications would develop a rival to Cisco's network hardware.

Here is the Cisco response.

In response to today's Facebook announcement, Cisco said in a statement to Ars, "It’s important to acknowledge that the largest web-scale companies driving OCP have the skills, resources, and specialized traffic patterns that justify considering this approach carefully. However, most IT departments won’t relish taking on the additional operational cost, skills and expertise that are required to integrate their own technology.

"We’re finding that the majority of customers are looking for a turnkey solution that gives them the programmability and flexibility they want, with lower operating costs, and that’s exactly what Cisco ACI will deliver, without compromises on scale, performance and security."