Facebook shares green data centre technology

Maggie Shiels BBC News 8 Apr 11;

Facebook has announced that it will share the design secrets behind its new energy-efficient data centre with rival companies.

The social network's facility in Prineville, Oregon is said to use 38% less power than existing centres.

It hopes, by making make the innovations public, to cut the amount of electricity the industry consumes.

Despite Facebook's advances, some environmental groups have criticised the firm over its green credentials.

Working under the title "Open Compute Project", Facebook will release specifications and mechanical drawings of the building and its servers.

"It's time to stop treating data centres like Fight Club [do not talk about them]," said Jonathan Heiliger, the company's vice president of technical operations.

His comments are likely to be interpreted as a dig at other web firms, such as Google, Twitter and Amazon which have kept their own designs under wraps.
Power hungry

Data centres use vast amounts of electricity to run their computer equipment and also to keep it cool.

Environmental group Greenpeace has estimated that their total global energy use will have reached 2 trillion kw/h by 2020.

Until now, Facebook has paid to lease its servers and storage space from other companies.

The Prineville plant is its first custom-built facility and cost $188m (£117m). Much has been made of its environmentally friendly specifications.

Among the innovations, the centre make extensive use of outside air, as opposed to air conditioning, to cool the rows of servers.

The machines themselves are also specially designed to maximise the new cooling system.

"The best way to reduce CO2 and improve the environment is to cut energy consumption and that is what we are doing," said Mr Heiliger.

Facebook has stripped out nonessential parts, paint, logos and stickers - saving, it claims, more than 6 pounds of materials per server.

However, Greenpeace said the company could have gone further to prove its commitment to sustainability.

"If Facebook wants to be a truly green company, it needs to reduce its gas emissions," said Casey Harrell, a climate campaigner.

"The way to do that is decouple its growth from its emissions footprint by using clean, renewable energy to power its business instead of dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power."

Greenpeace launched a campaign last year calling on Facebook to stop powering its business with energy from suppliers that use coal.

More than 101,000 Facebook users have so far clicked the "like" button on Greenpeace's campaign, dubbed "Facebook: Unfriend Coal" .
Customised cool

As well as saving money on power, the company said that running its own data centre would help it to push through future changes on the site.

"We found a lot of stuff mass manufacturers were putting out wasn't what we needed, so we customised it to better fit social applications," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Jonathan Heiliger explained further: "Having this control over our infrastructure gives us a ton of flexibility especially when turning on a new feature.

"Live commenting or searching for friends of friends requires this massive amount of computing and the fact we can do this and innovate and have all this control gives our engineers the flexibility to develop those products that wouldn't exist potentially."
Money and power

Facebook claims that, by sharing its design innovations, the wider web economy will benefit, especially small start-up companies.

Social gaming firm Zynga said it was looking at perhaps using some of the designs, while computer maker Dell said it definitely would.

"It's a very important step in helping the industry drive efficiency end-to-end," Forrest Norrod, Dell's vice president of servers told BBC News.

"This project is also very important in promoting the understanding of this technology and presents an opportunity to turbo charge innovation around data centre efficiency."

Dell announced that it plans to spend $1bn (£600m) building 10 data centres around the world.

The PC manufacturer is a partner in the Open Compute Project along with HP, AMD and Intel.

Rackspace, which manages servers for smaller companies, believes the cost savings cannot be ignored.

"This is a huge leap forward and will save millions and millions of dollars," said Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace.

"A good sized data centre probably spends about $10m a year on power and these new designs should drive down that cost by about 40% or $4m."

Facebook claimed that if one quarter of US data centres used specifications released by the Open Compute Project, the energy saved could power more than 160,000 homes.
Blue, not green

While Facebook hopes to make significant savings with its new data centre, the company has not been penny-pinching completely.

One area the team splurged on was lighting for the servers.

Engineer Amir Michael said he wanted to use blue LEDs but was told they cost 7 cents each, compared to green ones which were 2 cents per LED.

He opted for the blue ones anyway.

"I thought it would be really cool if the data centre glowed in blue. It's a pretty big environment and I wanted to add a little bit of character, a little bit of style to it," said Mr Michael.

Facebook makes data centers greener and cheaper
Glenn Chapman Yahoo News 7 Apr 11;

PALO ALTO, California (AFP) – Facebook on Thursday presented an Internet-obsessed world with a gift -- greener, cheaper data centers to more efficiently power online services.

The social networking star custom-designed hardware, power supply, and architecture of a new US data center that is 38 percent more power efficient and costs 24 percent less than the industry average.

Schematics and designs for Facebook's revolutionary data center in the Oregon city of Prineville were made available to the world as part of an Open Compute Project announced by founder Mark Zuckerberg.

"We found a lot of stuff mass manufacturers were putting out wasn't what we needed, so we customized it to better fit social applications," Zuckerberg said during a press conference at Facebook's campus in Palo Alto, California.

"We are trying to foster this ecosystem where developers can easily build startups."

A shift to hosting software applications as services in the Internet "cloud" is driving enormous growth of data centers globally, according to Graham Weston, chairman and founder of US computer network hosting giant Rackspace.

Cheaper data centers should translate into lower costs for Internet startups that typically rent computing capacity, providing a "turbo-charge" for innovation, according to Dell computer vice president of server platforms Forrest Norrod.

"Facebook's design is really a leap forward, because it is much simpler, cheaper and greener," Weston said. "I think it's the biggest reduction in server infrastructure cost in a decade."

San Francisco-based social game sensation Zynga is looking to use Facebook's technology in its data centers, which host popular online games such as "FarmVille" and "Zynga Poker."

"We think it is going to make a big difference in how we bring play to the Internet," Zynga chief technology officer Allen Leinwand said while taking part in the Facebook press conference.

"It should be fun for people to play on the Internet, but you need a lot of infrastructure behind that," he said. "We are really intrigued by what is going on here.

The power efficiency gains of the Open Compute Project design promises to shave millions of dollars off the electricity bill of a typical large data center, according to Weston.

If a quarter of the data centers in the United States switched to the new model it would save enough energy to power more than 160,000 homes, Facebook estimated.

"It's time to stop treating data centers like 'Fight Club' and demystify what is going on in there," Facebook vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heilinger said in a playful reference to a film based on secret gatherings for bare-knuckle matches.

Other Internet firms such as Google build their own data centers, but haven't made designs freely available as Facebook has at the website opencompute.org.

Developing countries where outdated and inefficient data centers are common could be prime beneficiaries of the free Facebook technology.

India, China and other countries are racing into an Internet Age that demands data centers, Dell's Norrod noted.

"There will be the opportunity for Internet companies in the developing world to take a leap forward, jumping over the past 15 years of learning," Norrod said. "That's going to happen."

Computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard along with chip companies Intel and Advanced Micro Devices worked with Facebook to develop the data center technology.

Facebook engineers hoped to get feedback and ideas to improve the designs.

"It is like the launch of the (Toyota) Prius, only you gave people the plans on how to make the Prius," said Intel data center group general manager Jason Waxman. "There are a lot of places around the world that could benefit from this kind of information."