Facebook confirms first data center outside US on edge of Arctic Circle | Hacker News Reader

Facebook confirms first data center outside US on edge of Arctic Circle

washingtonpost.com

What impact is this going to have on them from the legal side of things? They've got enough trouble with Facebook Ireland Ltd. and privacy/data retention, but now that they're actually storing user data in an EU state, does that make things more complicated for them?

The EU Data Rentention Directive should apply. From Wikipedia

"According to the directive, member states will have to store citizens' telecommunications data for six to 24 months stipulating a maximum time period. Under the directive the police and security agencies will be able to request access to details such as IP address and time of use of every email, phone call and text message sent or received. A request to access the information will be possible only with a court order."

However, this is not yet a law in Sweden, and it was not implemented in time. I believe Sweden pays a fine for this and but the political opposition has suspended it until 2012. It should be law by the time the data center is operational.

I guess FRA will be happy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

Yes, this is jackpot for FRA. It is also jackpot for those that wish Facebook less influence, since you can bet that Facebook traffic will be closely monitored by FRA, and if you don't like that, you must use Facebook less. But of course, Facebook will still know more about you than FRA will.

He said European users would get better performance from having a node for data traffic closer to them.

That's for sure. Did they previously have at least a CDN presence in Europe?

Looks like photos and graphics are on Akamai, so yes.

They're using Akamai. My profile picture is hosted on profile.ak.fbcdn.net, which for me resolves to a machine that looks like it's in a datacenter of my ISP.

I feel like this story sounds a little like something from Robopocalypse :)

Seriously though, kudos for them if they can capitalize on natural cooling.

It's a good move. I remember joking with a colleague once about submerging a datacenter in a lake for the same reason.

Not exactly submerged, nor actually a lake, but Googles Finnish data center is cooled with cold seawater.

It's no joke; Google has played with that.

They might save a small portion of their cooling costs. They won't go even by a long stretch. Keep in mind that in Luleå the summers reach 22-23 degrees Celsius easily. People are tanned and wear t-shirts, shorts and skirts up there during the summer just like anywhere else down south.

It can be warm in Lulea, in fact it reached 30C when I was last there in June, but that was exceptional. Typically, it's sub-zero for half the year and the summer is very mild.

It'll be a similar design to the datacenters in Prineville, Oregon and Forest City, NC. They pull in outside air, cool it a little bit with evaporative mist, mix it with air already in the datacenter, and then send it to the servers.

The air doesn't need to be 50F, just cool enough and at a sufficient pressure to circulate heat off the servers. Sweden will work great.

Here's Wikipedia's climate data for Lulea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lule%C3%A5#Climate

Looks a little cooler than most of the northern US. "Artic Circle" or not, you're right, this isn't "Open the doors and cool the servers" cold.

But it is "Open the doors and cool the servers" cold in winter at least, so savings from cooling are sure to be substantial. Coupled with the cheap electricity in summer, and well developed infrastructure, and you can see why it was chosen.

At first I thought, Canada? Yeh Canada. Then I found out it's Sweden. Still cool.

Hope this doesn't start the joke of "the cpus run so hot they melt the permafrost.

Hmmm, i submitted this yesterday.

800 million users, good lord.

What an exotic way to say "northern Sweden". These marketing people, sheesh!

Indeed, it's just sweden. In the summer it can be relative hot there :) The fact that it is cold over is not the main reason. Sweden is know for its good network infra

Well, they couldn't spell "Luleå" correctly either.

Lulea is the correct English alphabet spelling.

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