Facebook Puts Some Brains In Open Vault JBOD Storage

ARM or Atom, pick your embedded CPU and interconnect poison

At last week's Open Compute Summit 2013, the people behind the open source hardware project were showing off some enhancements for the Open Vault JBOD storage array that Facebook has cooked up for its own use in its two newest data centers and presumably will be added to its existing data center.

The Open Vault array, known by its code-name "Knox," has been contributed by the social network to the Open Compute Project open source hardware design effort. Among other things, Open Vault is used for cold storage of the 240 billion photos on the site, which is growing at a rate of 350 million per day, or 7PB per month. (You can see the Open Vault specs here.)

Open Vault is a JBOD array, which means it is just a bunch of disks and is intended to hang off a SAS controller inside of a server. In Facebook's case, that is a custom Open Compute V2 server using Intel's custom "Windmill" two-socket Xeon E5 server node...