How Facebook made Quanta redesign its servers

Storing pictures over a period of time is a challenge for even small households. So how does a company like Facebook, with over 1.1 billion users posting millions of images every second, overcome their big data problem?

When Facebook decided to open a new data centre at the Arctic coast town of Lulea in Sweden and redesign its old one in Oregon, USA, it also changed the way servers were made till then.

"Facebook chose the open server model and wanted to remove all the unnecessary parts. They removed the plastic front bezel, extra metal top, extra slots, peripherals, USB connectors, LCD panels and DVD ROM, all features they did not need in a cloud data centre," explained Mike Yang of Quanta QCT, the world's largest cloud data centre hardware provider who made the servers for Facebook.

Eliminating the covers ensured better ventilation, while the LCDs had been made redundant as the new servers were all to be monitored remotely.

"They wanted us to remove everything that did not contribute to efficiency," added Yang, speaking at the Intel Big Data and Cloud Summit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

All this made their new data centre 38 per cent power efficient and 24 per cent cost efficient. The servers were designed as part of Facebook's Open Computer Project initiative and hence others are free to use the hardware design.

Taiwan-based Quanta Computer is a $34-billion Fortune 500 company that makes notebooks for many of the world's top brands. Quanta QCT is their data centre subsidiary based in California. Yang, in one of the rare public announcements by Quanta, said the company has emerged as the top choice for hyper-scale data centres as it is among the few to provide server, storage and network switch under a single brand.

Lynn Comp, Director of Datacenter Solutions and Technologies at Intel, said big data was making companies re-imagine data centre solutions.

"It is a huge challenge. It asks for a level of real time response that most data centres have not built in," she said. Comp said Intel's Node Manager firmware and data centre manager track everything from fan speed to workflow. This helps data centres manage power utilisation better, she said, citing the examples of Baidu and Korea Telecom among others.

(The author attended the Intel Big Data & Cloud Summit in Vietnam on an invite from Intel)