Facebook snubs virtualisation

Computerworld.

Gio Coglitore, director of Facebook Labs, spoke at an Intel press briefing, where he came out in support of Intel's plans for an expanded line-up of processors for microservers, ranging from a 45-watt Xeon to an Atom-based processor that consumes less than 10W of power.

Facebook has tested microservers in production and is interested in the architecture for its massive data centres, Coglitore said.

ZD Net reports that Facebook refused to employ virtualisation across its infrastructure, because the technology does not scale efficiently.

Coglitore, says the social network shies away from abstracting its technology into virtual machines because at large-scale, the economics don't work out and the cost of dealing with hardware failures is too high.

Microservers, a concept that Intel introduced in 2009, are small, low-power, one processor servers that can be packed into a data centre more densely than rack or blade servers, reports Tech World.

The microservers in a rack typically share power and cooling and may also share storage and network connections, says Boyd Davis, VP of the Intel Architecture Group and GM of data centre group marketing.