Inside a Facebook Data Center

Facebook is a corporation and online social networking service, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old, was allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, use various apps and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Also users can complain or block unpleasant people. Facebook had over 1.59 billion monthly active users as of August 2015 (so more than there are cars on the planet). Facebook is nothing short of a phenomenon: the word largest social networking site valued over $100 billion dollars. With more than 1 in 7 people on earth uploading pictures, videos, sending messages or liking photos of friends, the question would be: how do they manage to store this staggering amount of data generated on a daily basis?

By using data centers of course! In Prineville (Oregon), stands one of the largest data centers on the planet: a monster of 300,000 square feet containing massive memory banks to store some of the data generated by facebook users online. The interconnected (via miles and miles of fibers and cables) servers located in this data center are somehow the “Internet” because all of the facebook users requests online are received by those servers which retrieve your information and compiled it. Your compiled information is then sent back to you across these same servers. And this process lasts just for milliseconds. Incredible isn’t it?

The Power Supply of this data center is 30 MW with a back-up power supply ensured by 14 diesel generators of 3 MW capacity each. Moreover, to cool its colocation rooms, this data center has a state-of-art natural air conditioning system which is a 7 rooms rooftop infrastructure. Cool air is sucked from the outside (the High Plaines of Oregon) to be mixed with warm air. The chilled air obtained is afterwards used to prevent servers in the colocation areas from overheating. Furthermore, since social networking and particularly Facebook is becoming more and more ubiquitous in our daily lives (600 million online login per day), meeting the demanding expectation of all these people is a harsh task. To meet this goal, not only thousands of servers are implemented in the data center on a daily basis but also new data centers are being built.