FOCUS FACEBOOK
Issue 10, June/July
Construction began in January and the data center is expected to come online around first quarter of 2011. Facebook hired DPR/Fortis as the project’s general contractor.
The two-story shell is a structural-steel building with concrete panels on the outside and a concrete-reinforced roof on each of its two decks. Pre-cast wall panels are 5.5 inches thick. Part of the outer shell will have horizontal metal siding. On the ground along the building’s northern wall are two rows of large bolts, which will be used to attach a wall of the future expansion phase if it becomes necessary to build one.
The server rooms will be on the ground level and the mechanical room will be on the second floor, which the builders also refer to as “the penthouse.”
The data center will have an evaporative cooling system that does not use chillers. Outside air will come in through fans that make up the entire western wall of the penthouse, where it will also get filtered. It will be brought to appropriate temperature and humidity levels by a mister system before being delivered from above to the server racks attached to the concrete floor (there will not be a raised floor). The design uses hot-aisle containment.
Return air will come back around to where outside air comes in – through large return openings in the floor long the western wall of the penthouse. Return air will mix with fresh air before being redistributed throughout the facility. Some of the warm return-air will be used for comfort heating of the office space.
evaporative cooling system that does not use chillers. Outside air will come in through fans that make up the entire western wall of the penthouse...”
“The data center will have an
“We’re basically using airside economizing, bringing in the atmospheric air and, where necessary, we … hydrate the air to ensure we have an appropriate relative humidity in the data center,” Patchett said.
“Even the act of hydrating air actually cools it, so think of it as a built-in, integral swamp cooler within the data center.”
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
Inside “the penthouse.” Fans for outside air will be along the wall on the left. Large openings in the floor are for ductwork that will bring hot return air back to the penthouse
Facebook’s Ken Patchett, DPR/Fortis Project Manager Rick Troop and DPR/Fortis Project Superintendent Doug Barnhart on the roof of the future Facebook data center
The dirt is getting prepped for a generator yard along the building’s east wall
The data center will use a proprietary non- standard UPS design (patent pending) with a block-redundant N+1 topology. All electrical work will be done by San Jose, California- based Rosendin Electric. Pacific Power will build a switching yard at the site and Facebook will build its own substation.
Most servers Facebook uses are off-the-shelf machines from a variety of manufacturers. The company works with the vendors to make the servers it buys from them more energy efficient. Patchett said Facebook will be using shared compute clusters within the data center, but would not go so far as to call the approach ‘private cloud.’
“I would say that almost every IT company or Internet-facing company today is doing something of that sort. We’re doing a very similar thing (but) I don’t know if it would fit the exact definition of what you call ‘cloud.’”
PROJECT GROWS ON PRINEVILLE The data center site is on the edge of Prineville, a town in a high-desert flat valley surrounded by tall, mostly snow-covered mountains. Considering the town’s size and remoteness, it comes as no surprise that many of its residents were less than thrilled when they first heard the news that Facebook was moving in.
“There were a lot of people who (felt) threatened by Facebook,” says Bill Gowen, CEO of the Prineville Chamber of Commerce. “It’s huge!” Data centers are largely unheard of in Central Oregon. The only other large- scale data center in the entire state is Google’s facility in The Dalles, which Patchett had been running until Facebook snagged him.
Facebook is huge and Prineville is a small rural town that went from asking questions like whether or not their lights would stay on or whether there would be enough water to go
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