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An artist's rendition of the future Facebook data center in Prineville, Ore. Image courtesy of Facebook
Construction has commenced on the popular social networking company Facebook’s first enterprise data center in Prineville, Ore., on Thursday. The facility will use airside economization; its data center floor will be cooled by an evaporative cooling system and some heat from the servers will be recaptured to warm air in the offices.
“We have come a long way from our roots in a Harvard dorm room, when Facebook was only available at some colleges and run on a single server,” the company’s VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger wrote in a blog post. “Now with more than 350 million people worldwide and our service and business continuing to grow, we must constantly scale our technical infrastructure to meet the demand…
An important step along the way is to build a custom data center so that we can design it to meet our unique needs.”
Until the decision to build its own data center, Facebook has been leasing space in numerous colocation facilities, gradually expanding to a point of having to lease entire buildings to house its IT infrastructure.
As with most other new data center build projects, design of the 117,000 square foot facility includes solutions and methods to maximize its energy efficiency. The evaporative cooling system “minimizes water consumption by using outside air,” Heiliger wrote, and uses less energy than a typical chilled-water system does.
The facility will be able to use airside economization 60-70 percent of the time per year. It will also take advantage of a proprietary patent-pending UPS system, which Heiliger said would reduce energy use. He did not provide further details on the type of technology used in the system.
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Keywords: Facebook, data center, enterprise data center, Facebook Prineville, Jonathan Heiliger | | 
