Facebook’s new energy efficient data center

Cloud technologies power some of Internet’s most well-known sites—Picasa, Gmail, Facebook and Zynga, just to name a few—and cloud companies are striving to make the computer processing behind these sites as energy efficient as possible. With that in mind, Facebook, Dell, HP, Rackspace, Skype, Zynga and others have teamed together to form the Open Compute Project to share best practices for making more energy efficient and economical data centers. To kick-start the project, Facebook unveiled its innovative new data center and contributed the specifications and designs to Open Compute. “Cloud companies are working hard to become more and more energy efficient…[and] this is a big step forward today in having computing be more and more green,” explains Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace. A small team of Facebook engineers has been working on the project for two years. They custom designed the software, servers and data center from the ground up. One of the most significant features of the facility was that Facebook eliminated the centralized UPS system found in most data centers. “In a typical data center, you’re taking utility voltage, you’re transforming it, you’re bringing it into the data center and you’re distributing it to your servers,” explains Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations at Facebook. “There are some intermediary steps there with a UPS system and with energy transformations that occur that cost you money and energy—between about 11% and 17%. In our …