Facebook's New Iowa Datacenter Goes Modular to Grow Forever
Facebook's New Iowa Datacenter Goes Modular to Grow Forever The company dropped its cluster design for a network fabric with smaller server pods. The traffic inside Facebook's datacenters is growing so fast that the company is changing the basic architecture of its networks in order to keep up. The new design, which Facebook calls a data center fabric, doesn't use a new link speed to make the network run faster. Instead, it turns the whole system into a set of modules that are less expensive and more widely available than what the company's using now. It's also easier to deploy and manage, according to Facebook's networking chief. Unlike older hierarchical networks, the modular design can provide consistently fast links across the data center for any two servers to talk to each other. The new architecture was used in a 476,000-square-foot (44,000-square-meter) data center that goes online today in Altoona, Iowa. Facebook plans to use it in all...