Facebook Yosemite

2015: Facebook begins to sell own Yosemite servers

On March 10, 2015 Facebook announced own server under the name Yosemite created in cooperation with Intel corporation. The new product became a part of the Open Compute Project (OCP) program which is actively advanced by the world's largest social network.^[1]

The compact Yosemite computing system consists of four modules, each of which is equipped with the upgraded Intel processor. Facebook says that the company did not use two-socket motherboards which can be met in many scalable server systems as they, though have rather high power, but are too bulky and consume excessively a lot of energy.

Facebook begins to sell own Yosemite servers

Operation of the server requires about 400 W of total power or slightly more than 90 W counting on one module. A crucial element of Yosemite is new Intel Xeon processor D in which eight physical cores are capable to process to 16 flows of instructions at the same time. The chip is characterized by the high energy efficiency inherent to representatives of a line of Intel Atom, but at the same time differs from them with an increased performance of 3.4 times, the vice president of Intel Jason Waxman (Jason Waxman) reported.

In the provided server several channels of RAM, at least one SSD interface and the controller of local management are used. Innovation is completely compatible to the Open Rack standard, in one rack can be located up to 192 server modules.

Facebook intends to involve Yosemite in the data centers and also expects that these servers will be used by other Internet companies. It is noted that Facebook and Intel worked on the new project about 18 months.

Yosemite is a part of an initiative of OCP within which open constructions of the equipment for data centers are created. Earlier Facebook announced the first-ever network switch with an open architecture — Wedge.

According to the vice president of Facebook for technical infrastructure Jay Parikh, work on OCP allowed the company to reduce costs on computing infrastructure approximately by $2 billion and also helped to save energy which would be enough for a power supply of 80 thousand houses.

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