“Facebook is bucking the trend toward server virtualization and is interested in microservers for inexpensive growth and quick failover”, the company’s lab director said on 15th March.
Facebook is here to support Intel’s plans for an expanded lineup of processors for microservers, as Gio Coglitore, director of Facebook labs, spoke at an Intel press briefing in San Francisco. There Intel said it would commence four new chips for microservers this year and in 2012, ranging from a 45-watt Xeon to an Atom-based processor with less than 10 watts of power consumption. All of them will be having server-class features, such as 64-bit compatibility and ECC (Error-Correcting Code) memory.
Facebook has tested microservers in production and is interested in the architecture for its massive data centers, Coglitore said. The inclusion of those server features is important for the company to be able to use microservers, he said.
Concept of microservers was introduced in 2009 by Intel. Microservers are small, low-power, one-processor servers that can be packed into a data center more densely than rack or blade servers. The microservers in a rack typically share power and cooling. It may also share storage and network connections, said Boyd Davis, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of data center group marketing.
Manufacturers including Dell, Seamicro and Tyan have adopted the architecture, which has been most popular among large cloud service providers for large-scale, low-end hosting and Web serving, according to Intel. The company expects microservers to remain about 10 percent of its server processor market.
Front-end Web servers are where Facebook is nearly ready to start using microservers, according to Coglitore. “With Intel’s announcement, it’s just about to happen,” he said. Facebook will probably start implementing microservers on a large scale beginning late this year or early next year.
Facebook uses a variety of server types across different parts of its data centers, but the company’s aversion to virtualization extends throughout its infrastructure, Coglitore said.
“We find in our testing that a realized environment brings efficiencies and brings the ability to scale more effectively,” Coglitore said. “If virtualization was the right approach, we would be a virtualized environment.”
Facebook wish to have a balance in its computing load across many systems and potentially lose a server without disgracing the user experience. Coglitore said, “As you start to virtualize, the importance of that individual server is greatly enhanced, and when you have that at scale, it becomes very difficult”. He think of computing units as faceless, interchangeable “foot soldiers” preferably. “Virtualization makes it harder to treat hardware resources that way,” Coglitore said. “Using a virtualization software layer also tends to create lock-in,” he said.
