Facebook has come up with a new way of designing and building its data centers following a pre-fabrication approach it says can save it two months in the building out of new data centers.

Facebook’s Altoona 1 data center in Iowa took 12 months to construct,  which was below the average amount of time it had previously taken to build new footprint, according to Facebook director of data center design engineering, Jay Park. It also was about 38 percent more energy than typical data center designs. 

But Facebook has improved on that with a new pre-fab approach called rapid deployment data center design, that can get its large new builds down to ten months.

Rapid deployment

“With our stick build design method (used for Facebook’s Altoona and Oregon data center) cost was pretty good. What we wanted to do was shorten construction times more as well as the cost,” Park said.

Stick build refers to the traditional ways of building out data centers.

For Facebook, its new rapid deployment means fitting the data center construction together using prefabricated pieces wherever size allows.

“It’s like Lego,” Park told an audience at Datacentre World in London today, pointing to an animation that shows data center walls roof panels slotting in easily to one another.

Size deterred facebook form its initial idea of building pre-manufactured units in their entirety.

“Scheme one came about when we took a cross sectional view inside the data center. But if you look at where we have the rack, then above that the cable trays, overhead power Bus and hot aisle, it is  16 feet wide and 14 feet high and this is pretty hard to ship,” Park said.

“So we looked above the racks at cable trays, and power Bus and this was only about 12 by 6 feet. We can pre manufacture these and repeat throughout the whole installation,” Park said.

“And above our data center space we have a penthouse, where all HVAC equipment is located, so we took the mechanics out of the roof and put them at the end of each data center and simply repeated on the other side. All electrical skits and supporting systems are now in the middle.”

The new method of design means construction teams can work on numerous parts of the construction in unison.“We will pour concrete then contractors will start building the structure which is the skin of the data center. As soon as that is done, the middle portion is done. One contractor can continue to build this thing out and the second set of contractors can start installing cabinet rows,” Park said.

The compartments within the data center have also been flat packed, and assembled from the floor instead of the ceiling means work can take place before the roof is fitted.

“It means we can start building as soon as the foundation is poured,” Park said.

Park said Facebook has considered modular data centers and even containers in the past to overcome construction constraints.

This was about five years ago and Park said at the time Facebook felt these options did not come with the flexibility facebook’s operations required.

“We also had a building that would last for 20 to 25 years,” Park said.“But we could see we had a lot of repetitiveness in the structure.”

Facebook sat its teams down for a ‘hackathon’ to work out how it could make its data center design more efficient. Its original goal was to build out data centers twice as fast as it has to date.

It may not have gotten to that speed yet but Park said he has been impressed with results tested by a construction company it called in to see out its idea before putting it to work in practice.

“It was very impressive. We just gave them the parts and they built it. I don’t know the exact time but it was pretty fast,” Park said.

Park said as well as contributing to lower costs and faster time to market, Facebook hopes to use this design to achieve LEED Platinum certification.

“With this pre manufactured stuff, you gain a few additional LEED points.” 

Update: this article includes clarifications suggested by Facebook in 2015