Photo tour of Facebook’s new datacenter

http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacenter/

208 49 15 years ago

akent• 15 years ago

I wonder why there are at least two ridiculously big (like, 4096 pixels wide?) embedded images that are forced to width=500 in the HTML? Ever heard of thumbnails?

chuhnk• 15 years ago

Rackspace are building a datacenter based on the opencompute plans, very cool. Exactly what I had thought about based on the announcement of open compute. Hosting companies, large companies and all sorts will be leveraging this information to increase the scale of computing in datacenters as a whole. I hope more companies will contribute to opencompute so we continue to see improvements like this. The facebook datacenter looks awesome, as you can see they are serious about being a long term company rivalling the likes of google.

torstesu• 15 years ago

How can this be more energy efficient than systems using cold ocean water to dump the heat surplus? E.g. The datacenters in iceland, where Opera has its datacenters. Would love some more details.

rwmj• 15 years ago

The problem is not what to do with the heat, but how to transfer the heat more efficiently than via air (which is very inefficient so you need lots of energy to blow lots of air around).

There's a cute promo video about half way down this page:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/12/green...

which shows one company's oil cooling solution.

Nitramp• 15 years ago

Discharging heat into nature is considered pollution by many countries by now, and in particular discharging it into bodies of water. You might simply not be allowed to do that, or you might have to pay hefty pollution taxes.

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

"Discharging heat into nature is considered pollution by many countries by now" - Citation please. I'm not doubting you, this is just the first I've heard that discharging heat into nature is considered "pollution.", and I'd be interested to hear the context. I suspect it's in rare scenarios where the water it's being discharged into has a limited heat sink (small lake/river?) Regardless, I find it highly dubious that discharging heat _from a data center into an ocean_ is considered pollution by any country in the world. And I'm willing to wager no country in the world charges hefty pollution taxes for doing so. In fact, I'd be surprised if anyone, ever, has been charged pollution taxes for discharging heat into the ocean. The ocean is pretty big. The United States, in an entire year, uses enough energy to only equal 1% of what the Sun does every day in terms of heat loading.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Su...

"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year."

1/365 of 3,850,000 exajoules = approx 10,000 exajoules.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule, " Energy in the United States used per year is roughly 105 EJ."

p0ppe• 15 years ago

Or how about data centers that use the excess heat to provide heating for homes? http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/data-center-housed-u...

davidw2• 15 years ago

Being from Oregon, I always get a kick out of seeing this... Facebook, in Prineville. It's a small town that's not much of anywhere. Previously, it was known as the HQ of Les Schwab (free beef!) Tires, but even they moved over to Bend.

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

I knew someone who worked at the Les Schwab HQ. She said that as soon as it was seemly after he passed away, they moved the operation to Bend. I can imagine an interview -- "Look, we want to hire you from Stanford Business School to run this multimillion section of our company, but Les is 85 and as soon as he goes we PROMISE we are moving to Bend."

Note -- this may seem sort of horrible, but I am under the impression that Les was the sort of guy to be completely face forward, and could say "Look -- I know you all want to move to a town with a Starbucks, but you just have to wait until I die. And then please keep donating money to the local football team when I go."

davidw2• 15 years ago

Looks like he was a pretty good guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Schwab

ck22• 15 years ago

So this is fun to look at, but considering how datacenters are supposed to be secure, isn't this counterproductive to them?

lreeves• 15 years ago

Generally datacenters are weary of photos due to housing hundreds or thousands of different customers, many of which who do not want photographs taken of their equipment or even to have the geographic location of their equipment exposed (governments, financial institutes, etc). At Facebooks datacenter the only occupant is Facebook, so it's nice that they aren't as paranoid and will show these photos.

Well, except the "no photos of the older equipment" rule that Scoble apparently ran into :-)

kreneskyp2• 15 years ago

There were various things we weren't allowed to take pictures of but mostly they were very open. You can't even get to the bathroom without a keycard. I don't think they have a reason to be paranoid.

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

Two facts:

#1. Nobody attacks data centers. No, really, they don't. Have some solid concrete walls, a man trap for people entry. a secure receiving area, and make sure your external doors are locked and you now have more security than is required for any data center short of critical infrastructure (nuclear/air-safety) - and probably enough for that as well.

#2. Even if people attacked data centers (which, honestly, they don't) - there was nothing in these tours that would increase their odds of successfully doing so. Much easier to just get a job there if you really had some desire to cause damage.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Indeed. Facebook's operational risk is probably geared towards making sure employees don't leak people's private data, rather than making sure someone doesn't blow a wall in the data center and cart off their disks. Because the first one happens, but the second one doesn't. Unless it's a movie.

ck22• 15 years ago

I know of two datacenter "attacks".

However they were inside jobs by disgruntled former employees which I know disqualifies my original concern.

zwp• 15 years ago

> Nobody attacks data centers. No really they don't.

I suggest that these "facts" are too general: nobody currently physically attacks this sort of datacenter in the US.

There are clearly many examples of physical attacks on other sorts of datacenter, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McDade.

Duff• 15 years ago

Correction: Nobody has attacked a datacenter.

I think that's a fact because the folks who blow things up aren't cognizant of their importance, or aren't using weapons appropriate to the task.

When the US attacks a country, what do they blow up first? A: Airfields, SAM sites, and Command/Control/Coordination centers. Datacenters and big telco facilities fall into that category.

wooster• 15 years ago

It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. That said, yeah, it doesn't increase odds of a robbery to give press tours.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/08/ocean...

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/11/04/armed...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2006/11/02/l...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381108,00.asp

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/easynet_brick_lane_r...

maukdaddy• 15 years ago

This is absolutely fantastic. I've been following the Google datacenter efficiency project for a while, and an opensource competitor will only make things better for the world. I can't wait for the day when more large companies either embrace this concept for their own datacenters or outsource to datacenters built on these technologies.

cmelbye• 15 years ago

Very cool, but why in the world would he use Instagram? All it did was crop the photo down to a square, so we couldn't see parts of the datacenter that weren't within that square.

jacobbijani• 15 years ago

Some of them look like polaroids now!

Scobleizer2• 15 years ago

I use Instagram because I have about 10,000 followers on that service. I go where my friends are.

JeremyBanks• 15 years ago

It seems silly for the quality of the photos in your article to be impacted by the way you share them on a social network.

soundlab• 15 years ago

Note the dual axis solar trackers in the field adjacent the facility. They are from Bend, OR solar startup PV Trackers http://www.pvtrackers.com/

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

Just a note: In the high desert, "evaporative cooling" (all those water jets, fans, and filters) are refered to as "swamp coolers". Much more poetic.

jpitz• 15 years ago

Y'all should know that we good ol southern folk calls em that too.

wefqwerq• 15 years ago

Why is a corporate guy wearing a jacket showing the datacenter ? Doesn't represent the startup spirit IMHO.

daveman692• 15 years ago

Because that's how Tom dresses. He's not a "corporate guy" but manages the team who runs our data centers and was directly involved in building this one.

bpodgursky• 15 years ago

Having "Startup spirit" doesn't mean imposing a new uniform of tshirts and khakis.

martincmartin• 15 years ago

Which brought up the question: why Prineville. ... low tax rates and friendly climate to business, etc.

In other words, whatever labor is needed is considered unskilled. You found a tech company in the Valley, NYC or Boston because, even though the costs are high, that's where you can attract the talent. When the quality of employees is a non-issue, you may as well place it in a place that's economically depressed, i.e. desperate.

forkandwait4• 15 years ago

I would imagine they will be importing most of the talent -- either from Portland, (inter)nationally, or at least from Bend or Eugene or Corvallis. My guess is that it really is the taxes + land costs + electricity costs + environment (cool high desert is great for evap cooling). Also Oregon has good business taxes, if high income tax. Finally, there is good skiing nearby at Bachelor, nearby Redmond has a great airport, etc.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

By the way, why did Rackspace send me there? For those who don’t know, I’m a full-time employee of Rackspace which is the world’s biggest web hosting company.

Scoble has a day job at Rackspace?

Scobleizer2• 15 years ago

Yes. Here's what I do at Rackspace: http://www.quora.com/What-does-Robert-Scoble-do-at-Rackspace...

rhizome2• 15 years ago

Nice query-spam suffix. Nothing personal, but it sounds less like a day job and more like a retainer for you to give RS presentations/info based on your normal travels.

fedd• 15 years ago

do all/many queries to facebook go to Prineville and how physically? shouldn't datacenters be in the middle of some thick cable hub?

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

The article explains that Prineville is a railroad town.

Some time back most railroads switched to using fibre optics for signalling purposes, not least because copper requires more repeaters and is more likely to be dug up by dickheads.

The amount of bandwidth needed for railroad signalling is pretty minimal, so many railroad companies now moonlight as telcos.

Also, back in the 1990s, a lot of firms laid additional fibre along the railroads because of the existing rights-of-way. Laying alongside a railroad is much faster because the legalities are settled -- you only need to negotiate with one organisation, not every little county you happen to cross.

Consequently there is a lot of spare capacity running along railroads.

mrmuhacks• 15 years ago

would be even more interesting if a tech person could do a tour/photoshoot instead of a non-technical buzzhound.

Photo tour of Facebook’s new datacenter

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