Facebook Accelerates its Data Center Expansion

Facebook is kicking kicked its infrastructure growth into a whole new gear. Today the company announced that it will build four additional data centers at its cloud campus in Papillion, Nebraska, for a total of six buildings and more than 2.6 million square feet of space to house servers and storage.

The expansion in Nebraska continues a trend in which Facebook is super-sizing the scale of Internet infrastructure, building bigger data centers, and larger cloud campuses. We first reported on last February, and the company’s construction program has accelerating relentlessly ever since.

Since the beginning of 2017, Facebook has announced five new cloud campuses. The social network now has 12 data center campuses around the globe, including nine in the U.S. and three in international markets. Facebook has nearly 15 million square feet of data center space completed or under construction, with several million more feet in the planning stages.

Each of these cloud campuses features enough land to build at least three data centers, and sometimes as many as six. Each data center is approximately 1,000 feet long, and includes multiple data halls, each of which houses tens of thousands of servers that process and store the status updates, photos and videos that are shared by Facebook users.

OCP Summit 2018 on Tap

As it creates its huge global network, Facebook is helping change the way data centers are built, and the equipment that fills them. Facebook shares its data center and IT design innovations publicly through the Open Compute Project (OCP), which it helped found in 2011 to accelerate the open hardware movement. The group has helped the principles of open source software movement be more widely adoptedin IT hardware, particularly among the largest “hyperscale” computing providers.

The OCP community will gather again this week in San Jose for the Open Compute Summit, where we can expect to see new innovations in data center hardware from Facebook and its partners. In 2017, Facebook shared updated designs for its Big Basin AI server and high-density Bryce Canyon storage unit.

Facebook has been scaling up its infrastructure to handle massive growth in user photo uploads, including custom cold storage facilities and the use of BluRay disks to save energy on long-term storage. Video storage can be an even larger and more expensive storage challenge, as HD video files are substantially larger than photos. This has infrastructure implications. VR and 360-degree video applications require a LOT of data, and delivering these experiences across the Internet presents a major challenge. Virtual reality content could be 5 to 20 times the size of today’s full HD video.

Getting Greener as it Grows

That’s why Facebook is building bigger cloud campuses. As it expands its Nebraska campus, Facebook is also sourcing additional renewable energy, which has become a key component of its data center projects.

Last year Facebook worked with  the Omaha Public Power District to create a new renewable energy tariff that allowed it to procure power from Enel Green Power’s Rattlesnake Creek Wind Project. As it adds data centers, it is expanding its power purchases.

“We will now increase our purchase from 200 MW to 320 MW to support our growth,” said Jim Piazza, Director of Data Center Operations, East. “We are excited to share that we have partnered with Adobe to help them enter the U.S. renewable energy market with Enel; 10 MW of Rattlesnake Creek will be allocated to Adobe.”

Data center hubs offer economies of scale, enabling companies to rapidly add server capacity and electric power as more workloads shift from in-house IT rooms into these massive server farms. Huge regional campuses allow cloud builders to address their toughest challenge: capacity planning. With demand for cloud services growing rapidly, it’s difficult to accurately predict how much data center space will be needed, and how soon.

Here’s a look at Facebook’s rapidly growing data center campuses around the world:

Prineville, Oregon: Facebook began work on its first site in Prineville in 2010, and has now completed three huge data centers, with two more in the works). The expansion project will give Facebook 2.15 million square feet of data center space in Prineville by 2021. The Oregon campus is where Facebook debuted its cold storage data center, a web-scale implementation of tiered storage that shifts older media in a lower-cost environment. Prineville also houses Facebook’s Mobile Device Lab, which it uses to test-drive revisions to its applications across up to 2,000 different types of smartphones.

Rutherford County, N.C.: The company’s 160-acre cloud campus in Forest City, North Carolina houses two major data centers, with a third in the construction phase, as well as three smaller cold data storage facilities. Forest City is located in an isothermal belt along the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge mountains, which provides a constant temperature.

Altoona, Iowa: The Altoona data center will soon reach 2.5 million square feet of data center space. The campus features three data centers between 468,000 SF and 496,000 SF. In 2016 the company added a 100,000 SF cold storage facility, and has recently began work on a fourth data center . Facebook has contracted for about 140 megawatts of power in a long-term power purchase agreement with a nearby Wellsburg, Iowa wind farm.

Lulea, Sweden: This data center campus marked the first expansion of Facebook’s infrastructure beyond the United States. For this project, Facebook was able to reduce the number of backup generators by 70 percent, as the extraordinary reliability of the regional power grid serving the town of Lulea allows the company to use fewer generators than in its U.S. facilities. The site is backed by locally generated hydro-electric energy and taps the chilly Nordic air to cool the tens of thousands of servers.