Inside Facebook’s Oregon data center
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
As I've told lots of folks, there isn't a lot of 'secret' non-obvious stuff for most folks when they decide to build an entire data center just for their gear. It completely removes the constrains that a generic co-location facility has to support 'any' gear, and that freedom allows you to do custom stuff which makes you more efficient. When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet :-)
Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?
You get funding, I board a plane to wherever you build this, and help you hack it. :)
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/18/video...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video...
Robert Scoble of Rackspace also posted photos and video from that initial tour. Since then Facebook has held two media tours of the facility. It's not rare at all, but the media that are just now gaining access are using the usual overhyped headlines to attract eyeballs.
Then please don't and try to refrain from posting :)
The rest of us haven't seen it yet and there are a few photos of the non open compute servers too. It's also perfectly fine to post older articles and stories here because they are often interesting to the HN community and make for good discussion.
Seems a bit excessive at first think but that is the price of resilience.
Considering only a fraction of that is concurrent users at any given time (maybe 10%), it still seem a bit excessive, but they're not running a web server, they're pushing data around so it's a bit different.
They also have to handle peak times and have redundancy.
As an example:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57345302/a-rare-look-a...
And of course there was this back in January of 2012:
http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-peek-inside-facebooks-o...
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
(I wouldn't say it's absolutely clear that the original title is linkbait either although it could be depending on the circumstances).
But jokes aside, don't you think with the way the users' numbers are going, the way the stock is plunging, the way that judges deny settling of privacy related issues, don't you think that Facebook should immediately pause all this type of projects and get back to drawing board?? you know, figure out how to increase revenue before possibly filling out the last pixel of white space with overwhelmingly irrelevant, boring and/or spammy ads??
- Facebook has a number of old, less efficient datacenters running older, less efficient servers. By replacing this old infrastructure with their own self-built datacenters in Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC, and Lulea, Sweden they are actually over time decreasing their total cost to operate the site, and riding moore's law to more efficient and powerful server systems. This actually saves the company money to operate the service, as well as streamlining and standardizing their production infrastructure for more ability to "move fast".
Of course it "affect the ability of the company to operate day to day". Not to mention morale of the team (and the monetary value of the company stock the own), it does affect it; good read here [1]
as of your second point, I agree with it and see the value now.
[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080918053426AA...
I don't personally use Facebook often and I do find the giant Like button to be... ominous.
This gallery doesn't "deeply interest" me, though, apart from the fact that it makes me more curious about Google's data centers. I don't know why they have to be so sneaky about them.