Facebook's Open Compute Project splits up monolithic servers with help from Intel, more

As much as it's important to have every component of a PC stuck together in a laptop, that same monolithic strategy is a major liability for server clusters: if one part breaks or grows obsolete, it can drag down everything else. Facebook and its Open Compute Project partners have just unveiled plans to loosen things up at the datacenter. A prototype, Atom-based rackmount server from Quanta Computer uses 100Gbps silicon photonics from Intel to connect parts at full speed, anywhere on the rack. F...