Dubbed the X-Gene server on a chip, the product has been touted by Applied as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence, the ideal part for webscale users (check out the pic of Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky holding one up) and also the future of Applied Micro. It’s the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip. It’s like shoving the networking and computing vision of the Cisco Unified Computing System on a chip.

This is a big deal. Although the first generation won’t have enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a switch at the top of a rack, the following generation will.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage (the board in the picture uses an FPGA instead of a production silicon) AND are now in the hands of several customers, including Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

Gopi’s big bet

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and contains eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores that Applied has designed, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software (the pink bit on the block diagram below), four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives. In short, this a chip that combines networking and computing in one package.

When about asked about the power consumption of the chip, Gopi said it will run at 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption.

“We’ll be able to run your LAMP stack and SQL jobs on Xeon-class ARM cores, and the routing protocols and such will be running on the Atom-class ARMs,” Gopi said. “It’s the fundamentals of a rack on a single chip.”

Building this chip has taken four years. It required Gopi to visit ARM at its U.K. headquarters to convince them to give him an architecture license to build a chip for servers. In an interview with me at the Open Compute Summit in January, Gopi explained that he saw the flexibility and the architecture that ARM offered could become an asset for webscale computing, so he embarked on turning Applied Micro, a public company with a few hundred million in revenue, into a startup.

Like others, such as Barry Evans of Calxeda or Andrew Feldman of Sea Micro, he saw that power issues were raising the cost of operating data centers — and cutting into the bottom line at web businesses — and he thought he had a solution. His solution was to get an architectural license from ARM, so he could make a 64-bit-capable chip ahead of ARM’s plans to introduce that powerful a core. ARM introduced that core last year, and vendors of ARM-based server chips such as AMD and Calxeda expect to have 64-bit-capable chips next year. But Applied is shipping those machines today.

“We’ll end this wimpy core vs. brawny core debate once and for all,” Gopi said.

The new hardware mindset

Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi.

The mobile industry has relied upon the common ARM architecture to build a wide variety of chips that give each vendor a slightly different set of features. Both Nvidia and Qualcomm start with ARM cores (hell, even Apple has an ARM architectural license) to build their application processors. This lowers the cost of designing chips, because engineers can start from a higher level when solving problems.

And the modularity of the ARM cores combined with an architecture license also means firms can customize their designs for a certain market without spending a huge amount of time or dollars. Gopi will actually address some of this at our Structure event June 19 and 20, in a presentation on designing hardware at the speed of software.

For Applied, this dynamic plays out in the existence of a new type of chip for the data center, but also in the fact that in nine or 12 months Applied plans to test the second-generation X-Gene chip, one that will support 100-Gigabit Ethernet and will obviate the need for a top-of-rack switch. Ironically, this architecture probably won’t be a welcome development for Applied’s existing networking clients like Cisco and Juniper.

But it’s clearly the direction that large webscale customers want to go. And the second-generation architecture is also important for the first-generation X-Gene products, because without it, Applied may not have a chance at getting technically savvy and forward-looking potential customers that need not just a single interesting product, but a real understanding of the roadmap before they commit to a new architecture.

So even as Applied ships these first products to customers for use in devices that hit the market at the end of this year, it’s already developing its production of the next generation 28-nanometer versions of the heavy-duty ARM cores and 100-Gigabit-capable networking while prepping for later versions that may include photonics and other elements that data center customers are already discussing as tomorrow’s technology.

It took a bold vision — and that trip to ARM — for Gopi to get Applied Micro to the table as these discussions about the next generation data center are playing out. But with this design, it has earned a seat. Now all it has to do is earn the business.

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This means that not only is TI confident that there’s a market for a new type of high performance computing chip (as well as one for webscale and cloud providers), but that TI thinks that integrating up to five 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports on that chip will make it more ideal for the new demands on data centers. As Tom Flanagan, the director of multicore strategy at TI said, the integration of 10-Gigabit Ethernet on the system on a chip means that the top-of-rack switch could be rendered moot.

Others are also thinking about the future of the top-of-rack chip, especially in scale-out data centers where traffic doesn’t stay confined to a rack but needs to communicate with servers in racks across mammoth data centers. For example, Frank Frankovsky of Facebook has said he’s trying to think outside that architecture. Facebook has also stepped up to support the developing ARM-based server ecosystem, appearing onstage as AMD said it would license the ARM core for server chips and joining an industry group aimed at building software for ARM servers.

The KeyStone purpose-built server architecture.

The integration of networking onto a single die (or chip) is an architecture that Intel talked up at its developer conference in September, but it plans to integrate 100 gigabit networking on the chip and it plans to do this by some unspecified future time. Texas Instruments says it is sampling its KeyStone architecture-based chips and they will be ready for servers by next year. Unlike some of the recent announcements from ARM partners in the server arena, TI plans to use the existing 32-bit ARM A15 processor cores married to its math-oriented digital signal processing chips, as opposed to the next generation A-50 cores that support 64-bit computing, but won’t be ready for servers until late in 2013 or early 2014.

Servers aren’t the only area where TI is trying out the ARM+DSP combo. It plans to use them for sensor-based chips as well as in normal networking equipment — both industries where TI has a long history. I have no idea if Texas Instruments can make DSP chips inside servers happen (the company has been talking this up since 2009) but the marriage of DSP and ARM, as well as integrated networking seems to offer a powerful product for real-time data analysis where you want to move and process a lot of information in parallel quickly.

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Frank Frankovsky, VP, Facebook
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Facebook has made waves by detailing its plans to use what an executive calls “cell-phone chips” — or “wimpy cores” — in its future data centers. Frank Frankovsky, the VP of infrastructure at Facebook, told me the social network plans to test such chips now and throughout next year, with plans to have them in production in 2014.

“We’re testing and generally bullish on the category, and based on some of the early testing our useful work per watt per dollar will improve, although that varies by workload,” said Frankovsky, “although our Hip Hop [loads are] the most CPU intensive and that hasn’t been ruled out.” HipHop is the open-source code Facebook uses to speed up the PHP code underlying the entire site.

But the question Frankovsky can’t or won’t answer is which of these cell-phone chips Facebook might adopt: a question that is hugely important, given the size of Facebook’s infrastructure and the influence it can exert on other companies as a founding member of the Open Compute Project. So let’s just do a quick rundown of the possible winners in this particular data center cage match.

Frankovsky was very clear in talking to me about what he thought of as a wimpy core. It doesn’t have to actually be an ARM chip to have the cell-phone-style architecture he referred to earlier. Intel’s Atom is still in the running. However, he did say graphics processors aren’t something he’s considering, because they don’t make sense for his workloads. On the issue of whether 64-bit-compatible chips would be in store, Frankovsky hedged, refusing to outright commit to 64-bit, but he said the social network doesn’t “plan to adopt anything that’s not 64-bit.”

As for timing, he said the testing is ongoing with some adoption in the latter half of 2013, and “if all the stars align then [Facebook's adoption] will be a material impact to the market” by 2014. So which companies might see the impact of Facebook’s adoption of wimpy cores? Let’s run down the contenders.

(L to R) Andrew Feldman of AMD, Barry Evans of Calexda, and Guido Appenzeller of Big Switch Networks
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Calxeda. This Austin, Texas–based startup counts Frankovsky as an advisor of sorts, but its product — a system that combines several ARM-based cores and a proprietary networking chip so those cores can communicate — is just off the line. Plus, it will have to wait until 2013 or 2014 until its systems can support the 64-bit instruction set. This is within the Frankovsky timeline, and the workloads he has mentioned are ones where Calxeda is trying to establish tests and benchmarks.

Marvell/Dell. Marvell is also using ARM-based cores in its Armada line of chips, and Dell has picked up those chips to start testing a line of servers. Dell announced the line in May, and it is already a huge supplier of hardware for Facebook as well as a participant in the Open Compute Project that Facebook founded. Plus, Frankovsky is a former Dell employee from the DCS group, where Facebook bought a lot of its hardware.

Intel. Frankovsky was very clear that he regards Intel’s Atom core to be in the class of wimpy cores he is considering. And while many may scoff, Intel has done a good job reducing the power consumption of its x86 chips for the Atom line, unveiling the Centerton chips this month that will ship inside HP’s low-power servers (HP also has a deal to bring Calxeda’s systems to market). The new systems will be able to do as much work as a traditional 150-watt system in a 12-to-14 watt envelope. Plus Intel already makes a 64-bit Atom part designed for SeaMicro, a company building low-power microservers. Intel has an existing relationship with Facebook, the dominant x86 architecture and a 64-bit part in the market.

AMD. This is a bit difficult to assess, given that prior to buying SeaMicro in March, AMD didn’t really have much of a story or option for wimpy cores. It still doesn’t, but buying SeaMicro, which uses Intel’s Atom part, gives it an entrée into the market that it will press. Plus, when I listed the competition Frankovsky told me, “I wouldn’t leave AMD out of this race either.”

Tilera. This Cambridge, Mass.–based startup has been building massively multicore chips designed for big data and cloud workloads since 2004. It has an advantage of having more than 10,000 existing cores running in production at unspecified customers, according to Ihab Bishara, the director of server solutions for Tilera. It has also been tried by Facebook in its 32-bit iteration and won favorable comments from the social network. Cynics have claimed Facebook did that test just to keep Intel on its toes, but Tilera has the first non-x86, 64-bit-based server available in the market and is already deployed in servers in 3 of the top 20 websites.

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(L to R) Derrick Harris, Stacey Higginbotham, and Om Malik of GigaOM
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

A parade of IT industry stars shared their perspectives on scaling gracefully during GigaOM’s Structure 2012. Here are some of the highlights.

Hardware woes and “strained” relationships

Intel previewed its next generation scale out Avoton chips while folks from AMD and Calxeda laid out the need for a data center fabric that would encompass the chips and the network. On Thursday we heard from Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky about his plans for possibly using a subscription model for buying CPUs and utterly deconstructing the server.

He also laid out Facebook’s efforts to boost page load times for users by putting Facebook hardware in various telecommunications points of presence. He also admitted that his company’s efforts may leave his relationship with some hardware vendors strained. And for those who aren’t designing their data centers and servers from the ground up to scale out most efficiently, a panel of data center providers laid out a variety of ways to deploy data centers that contains hundreds of thousands of servers without requiring a power plant.

Debra Chrapaty, CIO, Zynga
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Sadly, Debra Chrapaty the CIO of Zynga thinks hardware providers and data center owners could do more. She said the company has only seen “slight evolutions” in terms of things like server cooling. “We’ve yet to see true advances like alternative-energy-run data centers,” she said. “It’s certainly a topic worth a couple of hours of discussion.”

Fabrics are fabulous and OpenFlow takes a hit

Steve Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D, VMware
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The show had several panels that discussed fabrics and what the idea of a software-defined data center would mean. Steve Herrod CTO of VMware said it would mean the end of “server huggers,” people who like to know exactly which box is storing their data. In a deeper conversation Martin Casado of Nicira explained how far we have to go to get to any software-defined data center, while Dante Malagrino of Embrane said that when we got there, the types of IT jobs would change to reflect the programmatic nature of the new data center.

“Software-defined networking was so 2011, now we’re talking about software-defined data centers,” joked Malagrino onstage. But software-defined networking and the OpenFlow protocol did have their moment when Ken Duda of Arista got onstage and slammed the technology for having a limited use case (lawful interception of personal phone and data traffic). “It turns out OpenFlow 1.0 is a very good fit for that problem: I haven’t found any other problems for which I believe OpenFlow 1.0 is a good fit,” he said.

More snipes and gripes from API acrimony to database drama

A group hug ended the tensions of the API panel, but beforehand things were pretty tough as Marten Mikos of Eucalyptus fought it out with OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp of Nebula. Kemp likened the OpenStack effort to the Linux of cloud. “Don’t you mean the Unix of cloud?” countered Mikos referring to the fact that many companies are working on their own OpenStack implementations. “Or maybe it’s the Soviet Union of cloud,” he quipped, likening it to a collective farm allegedly run for the benefit of its members, but which tends to be inefficient.

That wasn’t the only slam at the event. Rackspace’s Lew Moorman took the stage to caution developers on Amazon’s closed infrastructure, while Amazon’s Werner Vogels made sure people in the audience understood that Amazon wasn’t about to stop innovating and moving forward. Hold onto your business plans, AWS-related services.

Meanwhile Google’s Sundar Pichai called Microsoft’s Windows ecosystem “ossified” and explained that apps would be the key to the Chromebook’s success as Google takes the device into the enterprise.

Unsettling ramifications for cloud and compliance.

Finally, the idea of the enterprise snuggling up to the cloud had its cautionary moment at the end of the show, as worries about compliance trickled in. It began with Alexei Rodriguez, VP of operations for Evernote pointing out that Amazon Web Services is a bit of a black box, which is why he built his own infrastructure. The topic of security and compliance also came up with the launch of Bromium, a new company aiming to isolate malicious threats on devices using micro-visors. And it ended with somewhat of a bang.

Stephanie Tayengco of Logicworks, Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs, Richard Nicholson of Paremus, and James Urquhart of enStratus at Structure 2012. (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com

“There is a good chance that almost every organization that is out there that is using Dropbox or that is using Box is breaking the law,” proclaimed Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies (see disclosure) during the last panel of the day at GigaOM’s Structure conference Thursday.

Kanies wasn’t out to scare people, but he had a point: Most companies don’t even have internal rules for the use of data with cloud services, save for a clear understanding of the law. Fellow panelist and enStratus VP of Product Strategy James Urquhart agreed, pointing out that courts have yet to device whether Fourth Amendment rights apply to documents saved in the cloud.

And that was a wrap for the show. Scaling is hard. The cloud is still tricky to navigate. And our current security and regulations aren’t keeping up.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million square foot Switch data center in Las Vegas. Servers are no longer the unit of computing, but instead are being taken completely apart or are a mere component in the new data-center sized computer, a trend being pushed by Frank Frankovsky at Facebook and at the Open Compute Foundation.

The walls between data centers will also matter less and less as software defined networks help create secure, flexible bandwidth between data centers and eventually continents, which folks like Martin Casado of Nicira are working on. This new era sees infrastructure as a service and the hardware becomes a fungible element, supporting a river of data and applications that flow on top of it. The U.S. government is certainly taking advantage of this shift with its Digital Government Strategy, led by U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel.

At GigaOM we’ve chronicled the development of this new era in our day-to-day writing and we’ll highlight these trends this week at our 5th Structure 2012 show on June 20 and 21 in San Francisco. Most importantly, we celebrate the people who are orchestrating this change — those who are building systems to enable and take advantage of it. Like any big shift that occurs over years, there are hundreds of influencers who will play a role, but we’ve chosen these ten who are instrumental in driving the vision. And now let’s meet them:

The Engineer
Martin Casado, CTO and Co-founder of Nicira

The Customer
Debra Chrapathy, CIO, Zynga

The Sheriff
Simon Crosby, CTO and Founder of Bromium

The Wildcard
Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda

The Disruptor
Frank Frankovsky, VP Facebook

The Developer
Tom Preston-Werner, Co-founder, Github

The Researcher
Jonathan Koomey, Consulting Professor Stanford

The Superhero
Rob Roy, CEO and Founder of Switch

The Regulator
Steve VanRoekel, US CIO

The Data Scientist
Andreas Sundquist, DNAnexus Co-founder

Images courtesy of IntelFreePress, DNAnexus, Nicira, Jonathan Koomey, U.S. government, Switch, Github, Facebook, Calxeda, Bromium, and Zynga.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky at the Open Compute event in May 2012.

Facebook’s giant user base of 901 million is served by an equally impressive number of servers, data centers and assorted networking and storage gear. And unlike Google, which also has built its own hardware designed to promote its infrastructure advantage, Facebook has taken steps to open much of its thinking on hardware IP to the world, creating the Open Compute Project.

In a meeting Monday at Facebook headquarters, Facebook’s SVP of Infrastructure Frank Frankovsky apparently opened up a bit more, discussing Facebook’s plans for a new type of networking gear. According to Wired, Facebook is rethinking the top of rack switch as part of a total rethinking in the type of gear users and how one operates that gear inside the data center. From the Wired piece:

“The interaction between servers and networking devices is going to become a very blurry line over time,” Frankovsky said. “What I’m envisioning is that the top-of-rack switch…will evolve to be more than just an Ethernet switch.” These switches, he said, will likely incorporate the boot devices for the servers as well as the equivalent of network interface cards — the cards that connect today’s servers to switches.

But it’s not just about networking. It’s about changing the contents of the data center and eliminating servers as we know them today. While I wasn’t at the meeting yesterday, Frankovsky and I had a long talk last week to discuss his plans as a precursor to our chat at our Structure Conference in two weeks.

I won’t out all of his thoughts here, but we did discuss his plans for the data center and how storage, servers and networking will end up in the data center of the future. In direct opposition to large equipment vendors such as Cisco, which saw the same blurry line between servers and networking devices, and so built its unified computing system that combined both elements in one proprietary box, Frankovsky is heading the other way.

“We’ve solved a lot of problems and drawn a lot of attention to building out the infrastructure, and the next wave of innovation must come from how to operate it efficiently over time,” Frankovsky told me. “The focus has to move now to operating efficiently at scale.”

He brought up the problem of the PC-refresh cycle that occurs every three years or so as the chip guys release next generation processors. Right now, people have to rip and replace a lot of their gear just to move to the next generation CPU. That’s expensive and will one day be unnecessary for Facebook if Frankovsky has his way.

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

He’s thinking of the server not as a box, but as a CPU with some DRAM on a sled that is slotted into the Open Rack design that Facebook is developing for the Open Compute Project with others. He also discussed changes to the top-of-rack switch that would see the elimination of network interface cards on a motherboard with the CPU. This way CPUs are replaceable without touching the networking which will be integrated throughout the rack with a new type of switch on top.

“The next generation of top of rack switches look like IO appliances with an integrated NIC that are no longer part of the server,” Frankovsky said. “So the server of tomorrow looks more like a rack.”

That’s a huge statement from someone in a very influential position in the data center and IT world. When Facebook created Open Compute last year, it was essentially staging a coup on the hardware vendors that weren’t meeting it’s needs. Frankovsky said at the time vendors were focused on “gratuitous innovation” as opposed to innovating where it counts. And in the current line of Open Compute designs those hardware vendors have now been hemmed in to a select zone on the Open Rack design where they can differentiate.

Executives from Dell and HP got up onstage at an Open Compute event in May and pretended to be happy about their new ability to focus and engineer in that area, but it’s no secret that their margins will suffer in the Open Compute regime. That’s one reason Dell is pushing ARM servers, which will still represent a system as yet untouched by Open Compute, as opposed to soldering some CPUs and DRAM on a sled and trying to sell it for a premium. That’s like trying to sell peanut butter and jelly at a premium — it can be done, but not to a mass audience.

And if Facebook’s re-imagining of the data center with storage (provided eventually by its Knox designs for Open Compute), servers and eventually the networking gear described above come to pass, its possible that EMC, Cisco, Juniper, Arista and others will feel HP and Dell’s current pain.

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At the third Open Compute Summit held at the Rackspace HQ in San Antonio, Texas, Frank Frankovsky, founding board member of the Open Compute Project, detailed the new companies joining the efforts. They include HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, DDN, Vantage, ZT Systems, Avnet, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling. HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the OCP Incubation Committee, which reviews proposed projects and decides if they make the grade.

Open Compute storage, racks and motherboards! Oh my!

Frank Frankovsky at the second Open Compute Summit.

But new members are not as exciting as new technologies and Frankovsky detailed contributions that Facebook is making as well as some new projects by other OCP members. Facebook is contributing its Knox vanity-free storage server and OpenRack, a rethink of the way server racks are designed to help improve energy efficiency and utility for webscale data centers. The OpenRack project expands the rack width from 19 inches to 21, and takes something that Frankovsky said was designed to hold 195os railroad switching equipment into the current era.

Outside of Facebook’s contributions, AMD and Intel have contributed motherboard designs aimed specifically at the financial services markets. And those financial service customers are no myth. Someone from Fidelity is expected to get onstage to discuss the private cloud that it’s building using Open Compute hardware. Fidelity will be one use case, and NTT, the data center provider is another. NTT has built a cloud using Open Compute hardware and OpenStack, creating an entirely open hardware infrastructure layer.

Building businesses with Open Compute.

It’s not entirely surprising that those building webscale, or just big, data centers would be trying to take advantage of the cost and energy efficiencies that the folks at OpenCompute are trying to promote. Frankovsky likens it to stripping everything to its essentials and adding back only what is needed. He explained that the standard keeps everything simple for vendors and buyers, but the specifications allowed on top of the standard allow for differentiation for industries and suppliers. The main difference seems to be that Open Compute has given large equipment buyers the power to dictate the standards and specs they want instead of the vendors doing so.

The Open Rack design.

That shift in power is what led me to wonder if Open Compute might mean the end of decent margins for HP, Dell, IBM and other vendors when Facebook launched the project. But it looks like the ecosystem is adapting. HP and Dell are showing off new server and storage designs that will be compatible with OCP’s Open Rack specification. And companies are building businesses around the Open Compute Project’s guidelines.

Quanta, the company that makes many of the servers that vendors like Dell sell, is launching a new business unit called QCT that will sell OCP gear direct to customers. Quanta’s business is aimed at selling gear to the likes of Facebook, Amazon(a amzn) and other IT buyers who know exactly what they want and just need someone to build it, but for those who have put a little less thought into their infrastructure stack, Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet are now some type of certified partner able to help companies create data centers using the OCP specifications.

So far the Open Compute Project members and vendors are walking the line between getting what they want from an industry that historically hasn’t been so responsive and making sure that buyers throw enough bones at them to ensure they can stay healthy. And while I don’t see Facebook buying from Avnet, I do think  data center gear that’s designed to operate at a large scale with maximum energy efficiency has a place even in the stodgiest of IT shops.

As Frankovsky writes in a blog post:

Perhaps most importantly, though, is the industry’s decreasing focus on what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” and its increasing focus on driving innovation where it matters. This is the work we have ahead of us in the coming months, as we pursue even greater advances and efficiencies in scale computing technology. It is no small task that we’ve set for ourselves – but as the last year has proven, we can accomplish anything if we work together in the open.

So viva cooperation! Although in this brave new world of webscale architecture, which Frankovsky thinks will influence high-performance computing and enterprise computing, it still remains to be seen how much relevance companies like Dell or HP will continue to have.

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The company is now building its own storage hardware to keep up with the exploding demand of its more than 840 million users, according to a Wired report. Facebook users put millions of their own photos and other digital paraphernalia on the site.

Frank Frankovsky, the former Dell hardware guy that who now spearheads Facebook’s data center hardware effort told Wired:

We’re taking the same approach we took with servers: Eliminate anything that’s not directly adding value. The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives. We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive — and make it more serviceable.

In October, Frankovsky told GigaOM that Facebook was also looking at storage as part of the overall Open Compute Project it launched to standardize the energy-efficient data center gear. At that time he said: “Storing data at this scale has some unique challenges. We’ll work on those contributions and with the rest of the community on this.”

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