

Microsoft reveals its server designs and releases open source code - DiabloD3
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/microsoft-reveals-its-server-designs-and-releases-open-source-code/

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maaaats
>> _" We also expect this server design to contribute to our environmental
sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by
10,000 tons across our base of 1 million servers."_

It's cool how you can save a lot on small things when stuff get so big.

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Hermel
10'000 tons is 10kg per server. That does not seem like "small things" to me.

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dghughes
It depends on its density 10kg of copper versus 10kg of aluminum would be
quite different in bulk.

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mattlutze
This is great news.

In the same way that openly shared and critiqued communication protocol specs
are a boon for incredibly performant, efficient and secure services, so too
can cracking the black box on data center hardware be for building even more
powerful server farms and the like.

It's cool to see Microsoft join with Facebook in being a disruption to a
closely kept branch of system design. The designs are open source -- any of
these threatened companies can take, learn from, and extend them.

If opening up designs like this is a threat to wages or jobs (I think the
argument might be "why pay a system designer if I can grab these specs") it's
the same threat presented by any technology advance. Innovate or die, as they
say.

Though, it would be nice that if a company is going to pay a team to design a
custom box, then open source that design, the least they could do is
prominently credit the team of engineers.

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boiler_up800
I feel this trend could really hurt Dell, HP, etc. Isn't the value in their
server business the server designs? There is no margin on manufacturing the
hardware.

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rplnt
You don't cross out maintenance and support by having more efficient hardware.
Those giants, by my understanding, make a lot of money from support or
directly from taking care of servers/datacenters.

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wmf
At scale, self-support and self-warranty is also cheaper than a support
contract from HP/Dell/Lenovo.

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daigoba66
Some previous discussion from 1-2 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134764)

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datamatt
But still no Age of Empires source code Q_Q

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rottyguy
With all these companies reporting, anyone have the cheat sheet on the
rankings of the size of the owned clusters by company? I suspect NSA is tops
but we'll never know (just like claims that Putin is the richest man in the
world :-)

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thrownaway2424
_eyeroll_ You can lose the NSA's largest datacenter in a corner of any Google,
Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple datacenter. Even their OMG-gigantzor
datacenter in Utah includes a mere 100k square feet of computer room floor
area. Given government overhead and inefficiency, a 100k sq-ft NSA datacenter
is probably the equivalent of a 10k sq-ft commercial datacenter.

By comparison, one of Apple's datacenter buildings is over 300k sq-ft, and
Apple is at best a minor also-ran in the datacenter business.

The NSA's computing facilities are insignificant compared to commercial
facilities.

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sbierwagen
That's because the commercial facilities are doing all the heavy lifting for
the NSA. Facebook does all the analysis, NSA gets the finished reports.

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mpyne
You realize NSA has a lot more signals interception programs than just PRISM,
right?

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ChuckMcM
Nice to see them joining Open Compute. I find the whole open compute thing
pretty interesting, having gotten the 'Google story' where the question "Why
should I pay for this sheet metal that only gets in the way of me fixing a
machine?" started an avalanche of other questions, to the whole "Why do we put
things in RELAY RACKS anyway?"

The current tension between 'colo facilities' and 'EC2/CE/Azure' is almost
palpable at times. I look forward to the first "OpenCompute Ready" hosting
facility that just needs you to plug in your server or storage boards.

~~~
rdl
Seems like an obvious thing to do (either bare metal rentals, or space for
cages) in Bonneville (where you can be dirt cheap in power and pretty cheap on
bw) and a few other locations.

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wilhil
Another open compute project, another day where I cry I don't manage enough
servers to get involved!

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NicoJuicy
Can someone elaborate how much extra value this creates to the project?

As Facebook and others already joined, i'm curious how much added value a big
company like Microsoft brings in.

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wmf
The MS servers are less weird than the Facebook servers, so they may appeal to
people who are just starting to get into Open Compute.

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rbanffy
Define "less weird"

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wmf
They use standard racks and standard power.

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kclay
This and android office365 sdk. Glad to see Microsoft making a move towards
the open web.

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EyeRelief
What is the motivation behind doing this? To my wary eye, I think this is
another way to depress wages.

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maaaats
How would this depress wages?

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bluedino
Commoditizing servers gets rid of the extra profits Dell/HP/IBM used to make
off server sales. They're basically just killing off the server industry for
companies at the scale of Microsoft/Facebook.

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nknighthb
It's already dead. I'm not sure it was ever alive. Companies like Google
started building their own servers long before present scales were ever
reached.

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nawitus
I wonder if it can handle paths with more than 254 characters.

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MindTwister
...but, why would you need it?

Once your path gets longer, aren't your essentially just stuffing your file
name with metadata which should belong in the file in the first place?

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nawitus
Wow, surprised at -4 downvotes. Handling long paths is necessary when working
with Node.js, for example.

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Nux
Microsoft and open compute, what a circus. Microsoft and "open" don't go
together.

If you want to see how open Microsoft likes it, check out M$ Secure Boot.

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mkr-hn
Had to double check and make sure I wasn't on Slashdot in 1998.

