Facebook Breaks Ground on Its First Dedicated Data Center

Facebook is now one of the biggest web sites in the world in terms of traffic and users and certainly one of the most complex. The varied nature of the actions users can make on the site also take a heavy toll on the infrastructure. This makes it surprising that Facebook has so far relied on rented data centers to power its operations, while other companies its size own an impressive infrastructure. This is about to change though, Facebook is now breaking ground on its first dedicated data center in Prineville, Oregon.

"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. An important step along the way is to build a custom data center so that we can design it to meet our unique needs," Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of technical operations, wrote.

"Today, we broke ground on our first custom data center in Prineville, Ore., during a ceremony with local officials. We are designing a facility that will be highly efficient and cost-effective for our operations today and into the future," he announced.

The social network claims it needed to build its own data center to meet its needs and has cost and efficiency as its main focus. Facebook says it will employ several technologies to keep costs down and minimize the impact on the environment.

For most of the year, the data center will rely on the colder outside air to keep the servers cool, the colder weather was one of the reasons it chose the location. In the summer months, it will employ an "Evaporative cooling system" which use water to cool down the air going into the facility. Coupled with several other solutions, it should keep energy costs down, an increasingly important goal for technology companies and something Google is especially known for. Data centers aren't cheap, but Facebook, with $750 million in funding so far, can certainly afford one. What's more, in the long run, building and maintaining it will end up being cheaper than just renting computing power during that period. The data center is expected to be operational about a year from now.