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Perched on top of a bluff overlooking
the town of Prineville, Oregon, sits
Facebook’s first data center. We broke
ground on the site in 2010 and began
serving traffic 18 months afterwards, in
a building that stretches as long as an
aircraft carrier, tucked away in the
shadows of the Cascade Mountains.
One of the central innovations we built
this data center around was the use of a
simple evaporative system to cool the
computing hardware inside. Instead of
using an expensive chiller, we draw the
dry, desert air of Central Oregon into
the penthouse section of our buildings
and add water as needed to regulate
humidity and temperature. Once that air
has traveled across the electronics and
is heated back up, it’s recycled or
pushed out of the building using giant
exhaust fans.
This cooling system is able to adjust
temperatures by as much as 20
degrees, and it has proven effective in
climates as diverse as Central Oregon,
Western North Carolina, and Northern
Sweden. More importantly, the energy
and cost savings associated with the use
of this system — when combined with a
series of other efficiency-focused
innovations in electrical handling and
hardware design — have been
significant. When we first turned
Prineville up in April 2011, we measured
it against our leased capacity at the time
and found that it was 38 percent more
energy efficient and at a 24 percent
lower cost.
This was a great start for Facebook’s
data center and hardware teams, and it
would have been very easy for us to
simply replicate these designs as we
Facebook
DESIGNING FOR THE
OPEN DATA CENTER
by Thomas Furlong
