The Year in Cloud: A Busy Year for Facebook Data Centers

Construction on Facebook’s data center campus in Prineville, Oregon in July 2016. (Photo: Rich Miller)

Feb. 20: Facebook Building Even Bigger Data Center Campuses: When Facebook unveiled its first company-built data center on the high plains of Central Oregon in 2011, it was a first step into the larger world of hyperscale cloud campuses. As it approaches 2 billion users, Facebook is hitting a new phase of growth, which includes building even larger data centers, and more data centers on each cloud campus. Read more. 

March 8: With Big Basin, Facebook Beefs Up its AI Hardware: Facebook is beefing up its high performance computing horsepower with Big Basin, an AI server powered by eight NVIDIA GPU accelerators. Big Basin was introduced at this year’s Open Compute Summit. Read more. [clickToTweet tweet=”Top News from Facebook in 2017: Building Bigger, Beefing Up #Hardware and Networks. #datacenters ” quote=”Top News from Facebook in 2017: Building Bigger, Beefing Up #Hardware and Networks. #datacenters”]

May 1: Facebook Express Network Speeds Traffic Between Data Centers: Facebook delivers an enormous amount of data to its 2 billion users, including the photos and videos you share with your friends. As data volumes have soared along with its growth, Facebook has built a dedicated network to manage the huge flows of machine-to-machine M2M traffic between its data centers. Read more. 

Big Basin, the new machine learning AI server Facebook introduced today at the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. (Photo: Facebook)

Sept. 5: Using Servers to Heat Homes — Facebook Embraces Heat Recycling: The latest company to embrace the strategy of using servers to heat homes is Facebook, which announced that its cloud campus in Odense, Denmark will connect to a neighborhood district heating system. Facebook will use heat energy from servers in its data center in Denmark to warm up to 6,900 nearby homes through a district heating system. Read more. 

Oct. 19: Facebook — Open Sharing Was Key to Addressing Arc Flash Incidents: Data center operators don’t love talking publicly about failure. Ranking high on the list of those unwelcome failures is arc flash. (FYI – An arc flashis the light and heat produced as part of an arc fault, a type of electrical explosion or discharge that results from a low-impedance connection through air to ground or another voltage phase in an electrical system. These can be a life safety issue in the data center.) At the 7×24 Exchange Fall Conference, Facebook disclosed two arc flash incidents at its data center in Sweden, and how its post-event analysis headed off other potential incidents. Read more. 

To read more and make sure you stay up to date on Facebook data center news, see here. 

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