Facebook launches new data center network architecture

In recent years, Iowa has become a very popular destination among the operators of data centers. Company Facebook officially announced the opening of the first building of its newest modular data centers with air cooling in Altoona. Representatives of the social network also reported that the data center will be the longest in the world.





This is the first data center Facebook, which is 100% will be supplied with power generated at wind power plants (WPP). During the construction of the data center was applied what Facebook calls the «data center fabric» - the design of the third generation on the basis of a single high-performance network that will replace the traditional clusters.

"This is one of the fastest processes of construction of all of our facilities, and this we must first of all be grateful to the local population of Iowa," - said Bryce Townes, construction manager in Altoona. Facebook has already started construction of the second building to the data center, expected date of completion and commissioning - the end of 2015.



Back in April 2013, the company planned to invest about $ 300 million. In the first stage of construction. It includes data center area of ​​44, 2 thousand sq. M. m., which consists of 4 storage building. Power will come from a wind farm near the town of Uellsberg. This wind farm plans to produce about 140 MW of power, which is more than enough to cover potential future growth.

A new kind of network architecture h4> To attract of Facebook, Altoona authorities released her from all property taxes for a period of 20 years. This data center will be the first to be put into operation where a new network architecture. Networking site Facebook had previously been built using clusters, but the company said that this method is not suitable for a good job "mega data center».



Network engineer Alexey Andreev объясняет, that the cluster size is limited by the density of the switch port. "They have their own internal architecture, which require more extensive knowledge in the field of software and hardware. Given the large area of ​​the data center, the impact of hardware and software failures can be pretty significant, "- said Andreev.

Deploying small clusters «pods», so they called the company Facebook, and the use of decentralized (peer to peer) network architecture, where each pod-cluster can "talk" with another pod-cluster, eliminating the need to use switches with high density.



A cluster consists of 4 pod devices - «fabric switches» conventional switches 48 and each of which is connected to «fabric switches» through channel 40G. Servers in a rack connected to the TOR switch using 10 Gbps channel, the total bandwidth of each rack - 160 Gb.



The system is fully automated, and engineers never have to configure individual device manually. If the device fails, it is replaced and is automatically configured by the software.

From now on, all your data centers using Facebook is going to build a new network architecture, and the existing object will move it gradually.



Source: habrahabr.ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/244153/