Commercial cloud providers are the way to go for today's Internet companies that are starting out but as they grow, benefits commercial clouds offers are eventually surpassed by benefits of having an in-house data center, according to Jonathan Heiliger, VP of technical operations at Facebook, the popular social networking company that is well on its way to bringing online its first own data center in Prineville, Ore.


Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger

For Facebook, which currently houses its entire infrastructure at commercial colocation facilities, the decision to build was driven by the total cost of ownership ÔÇô "we could do it cheaper" ÔÇô and by the benefits of having control of its own infrastructure. Because the company has a staff of engineers who are constantly creating new technological solutions to address the rapid growth in the number of users it serves, Facebook has fully appreciated the value of having a say in what its infrastructure is going to consist of.

"It's a constant evolution of all of our back-end systems," Heiliger said at the GigaOm Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "We're a product company and we're a technology company."

His opinion is not coming from observing Facebook alone. Heiliger said there were a number of Web properties that were "going to concrete," in some form, from infrastructures deployed in commercial clouds, as they grew. Some are building their own data centers, some are taking wholesale colocation space and some are leasing space from retail providers.

Facebook started construction of its 100,000-plus sq ft facility in Oregon in January 2010 and expects to bring it online in the first quarter of next year. It does not plan to reduce its presence in the colocation facilities it has been leasing.

In May, DatacenterDynamics paid a visit to the construction site of the facility. To read our exclusive feature about Facebook's project in Oregon, see the newest edition of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS.