Sociolatte

Facebook announced via Jonathan Heiliger that Facebook is building a new custom built data center, at the cost price of $180 million.

"When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server. However, as the site expanded to different colleges around the U.S., we needed to add more servers and data center capacity to keep up with the increasing number of people who were joining every day.

Initially, as most Internet startups do, we leased data center space alongside other companies in the same building. As our user base continued to grow and we developed Facebook into a much richer service, we reached the point where it was more efficient to lease entire buildings on our own. We are now ready to build our own."

Jonathan also spoke about energy efficient technologies that would be used

"Energy-Efficient Technologies
Along with making sure Facebook operates quickly for you, we wanted to minimize the environmental impact of our new facility and its energy costs. To best achieve those goals, we will use several energy-efficiency technologies, including:

• Evaporative cooling system: This system evaporates water to cool the incoming air, as opposed to traditional chiller systems that require more energy intensive equipment. This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air.
• Airside economizer: The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside. This feature will operate for between 60 percent and 70 percent of the year. The remainder of the year requires the use of the evaporative cooling system to meet temperature and humidity requirements.
• Re-use of server heat: A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and used to heat office space in the facility during the colder months.
• Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology: All data centers must have an uninterruptible power supply to continuously provide power to servers. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent."

Facebook is definitely taking a tighter control of all their users data and would like to handel everything in-house. The New Data Center will also allow them to better protect their servers and therefore better protect their users. Facebook was a small websites without any videos and photos, users by a few people. Now it has more than 350 million users woprld wide and shows no signs or letting up in it's growth. People are shoring photos, videos, openions, playing games and helping each other. This means that the are tons of data on FB servers. All of this data is what is converting the website into gold and this needs to be protected.

Facebook looks like it is taking everything seriously. They are also cutting out Ads from Microsoft as they would like to handel their Ads by themselves. As you will know FB ads are very different and creative. Soemthing not to be seen on other sites.

Facebook has a lot of creativity and technology to come up with and implement. All for the good of it's users. They have been active all the time better trying to understand their users and implem,ent such things as are relevent.

Here's a link the their new Data Center Page


Prineville Data Center - architectural rendering