Lance Albertson

Along with the rest of the OSU Open Source Lab crew (including students), I was invited to the grand opening of Facebook’s new datacenter yesterday in Prineville, Oregon. We were lucky enough to get a private tour by Facebook’s Senior Open Source Manager, David Recordon. I was very impressed with the facility on many levels.

I was glad I was able to get a close look at their Open Compute servers and racks in person. They were quite impressive. One triplet rack can hold ninty 1.5U servers which can add up quickly. We’re hoping to get one or two of these racks at the OSL. I hope they fit as those triplet racks were rather tall!

Here’s a look at a bank of their web & memcached servers. You can find the memcached servers with the large banks of RAM in the front of them (72Gs in each server). The web servers were running the Intel open compute boards while the memcached servers were using AMD. The blue LED’s on the servers cost Facebook an extra $0.05 per unit compared to green LED’s.

The hot aisle is shown here and was amazing quiet. Actually, the whole room was fairly quiet which is strange compared to our datacenter. Its because of the design of the open compute servers and the fact that they are using negative/positive airflow in the whole facility to push cold/hot air.

They had a lot of generators behind the building each a size of a bus easily. You can see their substation in the background. Also note the camera in the foreground, they were everywhere not to mention security because of Green Peace.

The whole trip was amazing and was just blown away by the sheer scale. Facebook is planning on building another facility next to this one within the next year. I was really happy that all of the OSL students were able to attend the trip as well as they rarely get a chance to see something like this.

We missed seeing Mark Zuckerburg by minutes unfortunately. We had a three hour drive back and it was around 8:10PM when we left and he showed up at 8:15PM. Damnit!

If you would like to see more of the pictures I took, please check out my album below.

Thanks David for inviting us!

I’m going to be speaking at SCALE 9x this year and giving a session on Scalable Virtualization with Ganeti on Saturday February 26th at 6pm.  I will be going over the basics of what Ganeti is and how you use it. This session will be very similar to the ones I gave last year at Open Source Bridge and LinuxCon Boston.

If you want to meet me in person and talk about what’s going on at the Open Source Lab, Supercell, Ganeti,Gentoo, or just other random stuff, feel free to! I’ll be the only person coming from the OSUOSL but I’ll be sure to represent us the best that I can.

See you at SCALE9x in a few weeks!

As some of you may have noticed, I usually carry around a tiny little black laptop when I’m at Beer and Blog or at a coffee shop. Since people ask about it so much, I decided to write a few blog posts about it with this being the first.

What is it? Its an EeePC 1000 from ASUS (the same guys that make motherboards). Its a new type of laptop that is generally referred to as a netbook mainly because it lacks some of the features that a normal laptop has such as a cdrom, being heavy, a multi-core power sucking CPU, and a huge screen. Outside of that, its like any other laptop with a few other enhancements. In my case, this EeePC has these features which I love about it.

• Long battery life, claims one day computing (6+hrs)
• Solid State Drives (SSD) – no moving parts & better battery life!
• Multi-touch track pad
• Very usable keyboard (92% from a normal laptop)
• Lightweight (2lbs 15oz)
• Fast 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor
• 802.11n Wi-Fi and Blue-tooth
• 1.3MP web cam

I’ve used my trusty 15″ PowerBook for many years and I still use it, but its become more of a hassle to carry around with me. I’m a UNIX Admin, so I don’t need much on my laptop (xterm, Firefox, Thunderbird, and pidgin) to get work done and the EeePC was a perfect fit. The first models that ASUS releases for the EeePC didn’t appeal to me since they had a screen and keyboard that was too small for me to deal with. A good friend of mine (who also has the habit of being an enabler for me :P) purchased one for himself and kept raging about it. I was actually considering getting an upgrade for my PowerBook but didn’t want to pay $2K for a new MacBook, so instead I decided to get this EeePC for  around $500 (its down to $430 now).

Asus gives you two options for Operating Systems on these laptops: Windows XP or Linux (Xandros). Since I’m a Gentoo developer, I decided to give it a try on this laptop. I encountered a few issues of course, but overall I have all the hardware working. The only annoying thing so far is the wireless driver not being included in the mainline kernel, but that’s going to change soon I hope. There is an open source driver but its a little finicky to deal with on networks using any form of security passwords. But it does work!

In the upcoming posts, I plan to write about the following:

• How I installed Gentoo on it
• Gentoo tweaks I use on it
• Window management
• Firefox tweaks (yes, you need them!)
• How netbooks are helping promote Linux to the masses

I love my EeePC and you should get one too! :)