Inside Facebook’s Oregon data center

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/a-rare-look-inside-facebooks-oregon-data-center-photos-video/

by philip1209 • 14 years ago

94 22 14 years ago

kshatrea• 14 years ago

I don't mean to be snarky, but I don't think it is rare for us at all. I've seen a few articles before on the Prineville data center. I remember an article when they unveiled "Open Compute". At that time, there were quite a few articles about it.

rdl• 14 years ago

First time I've seen photos, though.

wmf• 14 years ago

Facebook's been showing this off for 18 months. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/04/09/OpenComputeMecha...

chucknthem• 14 years ago

> I don't mean to be snarky

Then please don't and try to refrain from posting :)

The rest of us haven't seen it yet and there are a few photos of the non open compute servers too. It's also perfectly fine to post older articles and stories here because they are often interesting to the HN community and make for good discussion.

mediocregopher• 14 years ago

I don't think his/her issue was with the fact that this has been posted before or that it's "old", the article certainly isn't, but with the fact that the article is describing going into this datacenter as a rare experience. Apparently, it's not a very rare experience, and calling it so only serves to sensationalize the title.

davidw• 14 years ago

As a native of Oregon, the mention of "Prineville" and "Data Center" in the same sentence always makes my mind reel a little bit. It's a ways away from much of anything, and was previously known for 1) cows and 2) Les Schwab Tires (which moved to Bend pretty much as soon as possible after Les passed away).

morinted• 14 years ago

This is pretty cool!

I don't personally use Facebook often and I do find the giant Like button to be... ominous.

This gallery doesn't "deeply interest" me, though, apart from the fact that it makes me more curious about Google's data centers. I don't know why they have to be so sneaky about them.

larrys2• 14 years ago

This was cool. But while the title says "a rare look inside" I wonder how rare this really is? When something is rare or unusual many times it ends up first on a major news show where it can gain from mainstream publicity and influence. Specifically coming to mind in the US is "60 Minutes" which frequently airs never before seen or extremely rarely seen things (and interviews) and is given access because of their exclusivity and established brand. Everybody uses facebook so things like this would be of interest to a national news audience. I'd venture to say that giving gigaom access is hardly rare.

As an example:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57345302/a-rare-look-a...

And of course there was this back in January of 2012:

http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-peek-inside-facebooks-o...

philip12092• 14 years ago

"A rare look inside" seemed odd to me, but I decided to repost the original title verbatim. If pg wants to edit it, he is welcome to!

larrys2• 14 years ago

Oh I'm not referring to the HN title but the article title. The HN title generally should be the article title.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

(I wouldn't say it's absolutely clear that the original title is linkbait either although it could be depending on the circumstances).

1SockChuck• 14 years ago

Data Center Knowledge posted detailed video tours in April 2011, when the Prineville data center opened:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/18/video...

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video...

Robert Scoble of Rackspace also posted photos and video from that initial tour. Since then Facebook has held two media tours of the facility. It's not rare at all, but the media that are just now gaining access are using the usual overhyped headlines to attract eyeballs.

JPRan• 14 years ago

What a waste of natural resources. All this just so I can poke someone?

joering22• 14 years ago

Jokingly, I've seen those before and yes there are always fun to watch - the only thing that could impress me now is if they build one on Mars.

But jokes aside, don't you think with the way the users' numbers are going, the way the stock is plunging, the way that judges deny settling of privacy related issues, don't you think that Facebook should immediately pause all this type of projects and get back to drawing board?? you know, figure out how to increase revenue before possibly filling out the last pixel of white space with overwhelmingly irrelevant, boring and/or spammy ads??

flyt• 14 years ago

- Facebook earned one billion dollars of cash on the day of the IPO. Subsequent stock swings don't affect the ability of the company to operate day to day, or make capital improvements.

- Facebook has a number of old, less efficient datacenters running older, less efficient servers. By replacing this old infrastructure with their own self-built datacenters in Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC, and Lulea, Sweden they are actually over time decreasing their total cost to operate the site, and riding moore's law to more efficient and powerful server systems. This actually saves the company money to operate the service, as well as streamlining and standardizing their production infrastructure for more ability to "move fast".

joering22• 14 years ago

Seriously, 50% down of the stock value is a "stock swing" for you?

Of course it "affect the ability of the company to operate day to day". Not to mention morale of the team (and the monetary value of the company stock the own), it does affect it; good read here [1]

as of your second point, I agree with it and see the value now.

[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080918053426AA...

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that no major harm seems to have come to Facebook after they revealed what it looked like inside their data center :-) Some folks would have you believe that a refrigerated room full of servers was a state secret.

As I've told lots of folks, there isn't a lot of 'secret' non-obvious stuff for most folks when they decide to build an entire data center just for their gear. It completely removes the constrains that a generic co-location facility has to support 'any' gear, and that freedom allows you to do custom stuff which makes you more efficient. When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet :-)

orangethirty2• 14 years ago

When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet.

Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Way ahead of you :-) I made up some plans for a 'pocket' data center (think pocket battleship). In the past such things have been infeasible because the scale was needed to achieve the economics, but advances in energy deployment and network design have created an opportunity here. Now we just need $25M to build one :-)

aleem• 14 years ago

That is 1 server for every 50 users.

Seems a bit excessive at first think but that is the price of resilience.

powertower• 14 years ago

900MM-users div 180KK-servers = 5000 users/server

Considering only a fraction of that is concurrent users at any given time (maybe 10%), it still seem a bit excessive, but they're not running a web server, they're pushing data around so it's a bit different.

They also have to handle peak times and have redundancy.

Inside Facebook’s Oregon data center

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