Facebook's Frank Frankovsky was on a panel at Structure 2011 and was as Dell's Forrest Norrod the baloney in the sandwich between the vendors VMware and Dell. Frank looks like a pretty happy piece of Baloney here.

THE ECONOMICS OF OPEN EVERYTHING

The power of open-source software can’t be denied. At its best, it has democratized innovation and is a stub for other subsequent innovations. Think Apache and the web. But where is the money in it? Does there have to be a profit motive? We talk to two exponents of recent projects -- Open Stack and Cloud Foundry -- both of which are open and have the promise to shake up the cloud industry.

Moderated by:Lew Moorman - Chief Strategy Officer and President of the Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace
Speakers:Derek Collison - CTO, Chief Archictect, Cloud Division, VMware

Frank Frankovsky - Director, Hardware Design and Supply Chain, Facebook

Forrest Norrod - VP and GM, Server Platforms, Dell

The session was dynamic and Forrest Nod was able to crack a few smiles as well.

I didn't get a picture of Frank and Forrest smiling at the same time, but they are both looking quite serious here.

I caught Frank later at the conference and he said they shared their Open Compute summit information that they had on June 17, 2011. I am going to break the information into a few posts - this one is server and storage hardware.

Facebook's Amir Michael announced v2.0 of the Open Computer Server that doubles the motherboard densities in the 1 1/2 U design.

Doubling the Compute Density

Amir Michael, Facebook’s hardware design manager, introduced our new initiatives in server hardware, presenting new AMD and Intel motherboard designs that double the compute density relative to our original designs.

Instead of placing a single motherboard in each chassis, we’re now building servers with two narrow motherboards sitting next to each other. These motherboards support the next generation of Intel processors and AMD’s Interlagos. To enable these new designs, we’ve also modified the server chassis, power supply (700W output from 450W), server cabinet, and battery backup cabinet.

What was not clear is what Facebook does for big storage for all the pictures on Facebook pages. And.... the answer is Storage Server 1.0 which can support from one to four server connections with a variety of connection technologies to provide low cost and high performance.

Storage Server v1.0

One question that has been asked a number of times since releasing version 1.0 of the Open Compute designs is if Facebook plans to build a storage server. Amir announced a project designed for our storage intensive applications. It’s actually a platform approach in that you can vary the ratio of compute to storage using the same physical building blocks. If you fully load the server, each storage node can support 50 hard drives split across two controllers.