VIDEO: Facebook Advancing Open Source Storage with Open Vault

Amir Michael, Facebook’s system engineering team lead, told InfoStor that Open Vault is one of the most interesting projects within Open Compute today.

“Open Vault is Open Compute for a storage platform,” Michael said.

Open Vault is based on the concept of JBOD(Just a Bunch of Disks). The JBOD is then interfaced to Facebook’s Open Compute server platform.

“This is the first time that there will be an open source storage-type of technology behind there [Open Compute] and it’s based primarily around the SAS protocol,” Michael said.

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) has become increasingly popular in recent years as hardware vendors embrace it to accelerate storage performance.

Open Vault interfaces lots of drives together in a very dense way, according to Michael. He noted that most storage hardware today is front facing, such that it consumes a lot of space at the front of a server rack. That fact limits the number of storage drives that can then be deployed inside of a rack. Open Vault takes a different approach.

“We went ahead and stacked the drives deep inside the server as well, which allows us to have more drive density,” Michael said.

Read the full story at InfoStor:
Facebook Details Open Compute Storage Plans

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.