

The high cost associated with off-the-shelf devices create limitations for many in the industry.
#Open time clock software#
In most cases, they are outdated and often vulnerable to software security concerns.However, these solutions also come with trade-offs: They work right out of the box and because many of these devices have been on the market for decades, they are battle-tested and generally stable enough to work without supervision for a long time. Off-the-shelf time appliances have their own benefits.

While building our Time Appliance, we also invented a Time Card, a PCIe card that can turn any commodity server into a time appliance. Users of time appliances can keep accurate time, even in the event of GNSS connectivity loss. To remove these dependencies, we’ve built a new dedicated piece of hardware called Time Appliance, which consists of a GNSS receiver and a miniaturized atomic clock (MAC). For instance, if connectivity is lost or an external service is down, it can result in outages or drift in timing for the dependent system. These pools add dependency on internet connectivity and can impact overall security and reliability of the system. However, this approach has its drawbacks.

Many companies rely on public NTP pools such as to act as their Stratum 1. The new NTP-based time architecture uses a Stratum 1 - an important component that is directly linked to an authoritative source of time, such as a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) or a cesium clock. More accurate time keeping enables more advanced infrastructure management across our data centers, as well as faster performance of distributed databases. The new service, built in-house and later open-sourced, was more scalable and improved the accuracy of timekeeping in the Facebook infrastructure from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds. In March 2020, we announced that we were in the process of switching over the servers in our data centers (together with our consumer products) to a new timekeeping service based on the Network Time Protocol (NTP). With the help of the OCP community, we established the Open Compute Time Appliance Project and open-sourced every aspect of the Open Time Server.

