Facebook today is announcing that it has expanded the capabilities of OpenBMC, the open-source software that the social networking company developed to help it control certain aspects of its data center hardware.
When Facebook introduced OpenBMC — which is essentially a full-on Linux distribution to deal with hardware components such as sensors — in March, the company said the tool could control Facebook’s Wedge custom networking switches. But Facebook has since gone further and added support for Facebook’s efficient Yosemite servers.
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Yosemite’s architecture is highly distributed, and Facebook has explicitly designed for it.
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“Typical BMC supports one only one server node (or payload in IPMI terminology) at a time following the original IPMI architecture,” Facebook engineer Sai Dasari wrote in a blog post. “In case of Yosemite, the OpenBMC has to support four independent server boards/nodes. To support this multi-node model, various software modules in OpenBMC are updated with support for multiple nodes.”
Employees can now SSH into the servers with OpenBMC for debugging purposes and manage servers with a REST application programming interface for OpenBMC, Dasari wrote.
Check out Dasari’s full blog post to learn more about the improvements on OpenBMC, which is available on GitHub here.
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