Facebook is rethinking the way online storage works

Interesting article at Wired about the Facebook Open Compute Project and how they are rethinking the requirements for online storage.

The project began with Facebook's data center and server designs. But it has since expanded to various other sub-projects, and the contributors include more than just web companies. Rackspace contributes, but so does financial giant Goldman Sachs.

Rackspace is leading an effort to build a "virtual I/O" protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today's servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, for instance, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. "DRAM doesn't [change] as fast as CPUs," Frankovsky says. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could actually disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?"

With a sister project, project members are also working to create a new rack design that can accommodate this sort of re-imagined server infrastructure. A traditional server rack houses several individual machines, each with its own chassis. But the Open Rack project seeks to do away with the server chassis entirely and turn the rack into the chassis.

All I can say is all this rethinking better not interrupt my access to my online porn collection.