Facebook to launch first data centre

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Facebook will be launching its first ever data centre after renting server space for nearly six years.

Jonathan Heiliger, the social networking site’s vice president of technical operations, announced the company is designing a new custom data centre in Prineville, Oregon.

“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,” said Heiliger 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 and deliver you a fast, reliable experience.”

The company is keen to make the data centre very green and as a result will include an evaporative cooling system – evaporating water to cool the incoming air – using cold air from outside to cool the hardware and utilising server heat to warm office space in the colder months.

It will also use a new patent-pending Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology that claims to reduce electricity use by up to 12 per cent compared to standard UPSs.

“The new data centre will help us by adding more computing and storage capacity, which we expect to help us deliver a faster, more reliable experience worldwide,” added Heiliger.

“This is just one step along the way in building a business for the long term and dedicating resources to scale our site to support our users, developers and advertisers.”

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