Facebook just fired four more shots into the belly of the $53 billion server market (FB)

pulse

March 8, 2017 8:43 PM

Facebook keeps inventing impressive data center technology and giving its designs away for free.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In just six years, Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) has become a major phenom in the data center hardware industry that has attracted an almost cult-like following among engineers.

And on Wednesday, Facebook upped the bar yet again.

Facebook announced that it was giving away four new designs for brand-new types of computer servers invented at Facebook.

Anyone can take these designs, modify them and use them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them.

Those contract manufacturers include Chinese companies ike Quanta, as well as the world's largest maker of computer servers, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Better and cheaper

While Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has a chip in this Open Compute Project game, OCP's influence hasn't necessarily been a boon to the company. That's because OCP is to data center hardware what Linux is to software: open source. Engineers all collaborate freely on designs, with no intellectual property ownership barriers.

And other big cloud providers, like Google and especially Microsoft, have been involved in OCP, using designs themselves and sharing some of their own tech innovations.

Apple, too, is involved, as is AT&T, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and many others.

To that end, Facebook's technical program manager Arlene Gabriana Murillo announced these four new servers on Wednesday, which adds to and updates a handful of other servers it has already contributed to OCP. Take a look:

"Bryce Canyon" is a storage server for things like photos and videos that can hold more (20% higher hard disk drive density) and run faster (4x increase in compute capability) over the predecessor Facebook invented (known as "Honey Badger").

"Yosemite v2" is a server that keeps chugging away even when someone yanks out bits and pieces of its insides to replace or repair them.

"Tioga Pass" is a computer server that processes big chunks of data in memory, making it faster than conventional servers as well as its predecessor "Leopard." (It uses dual-socket motherboards and more i/o bandwidth for things like memory and graphics processing).

"Big Basin" may be the most interesting one of all. It is a server used to train neural networks, the "machine learning" technology. Artificially intelligent computers must consume large numbers of examples of something in order to recognize it. For instance, they must see gobs of photos of dogs in order to learn that a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua are both labeled "dog." Big Basin can consume 30% larger data sets than the previous training server (named Big Sur), making AI systems smarter and more reliable.

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