Curious about what Facebook looks like from the inside? Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared rare photos on the social network from a data center in Sweden, the first to be opened outside the United States. It houses as many as 3.75 million servers, miles of cables and pipes, ventilators and everything Facebook knows about you. Welcome to the Matrix!
Facebook opened the first data center outside the USA already in the summer of 2013 in Sweden, Mark Zuckerberg but he is more than obviously extremely proud of him, as he shared on the social network rare photos center located in the city Luleå and stores data every fourth Facebook user in the world. A very limited number of people have access to the centers.
The data center in Sweden is gigantic, as it occupies an area six American football fields. Why did Zuckerberg put the data center so far from home? Cooling of such a number of servers is a problem faced by many tech giants. He decided on Sweden based on three factors, namely the climate there is ideal, because it is average temperature only two degrees Celsius, which enables easy cooling and great energy savings. When temperatures drop to –30 degrees Celsius, the energy of the servers is used for building heating. Also, energy is cheap there, as Luleå has hydroelectric plant, which provides a renewable source of energy, and fast optical connections, which are standard in Sweden.
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The servers included in the project are located in this data center Open Compute Project (OCP) Facebook compiled itself, that's why they are cheaper and have less hardware from commercial ones. PUE of the system (that is, the efficiency of energy use) is only 1.07, which means that consumes 1.07 W of energy for 1 W of computing power. The mentioned data center, in which 150 people are employed (one employee takes care of 25 thousand servers), is one of five, and the sixth is being built in the place Clonee in Ireland, which will be completed in 2018. And which photo is Mark Zuckerberg's favorite? As he wrote on Facebook, he especially likes the one with ventilators, as the scene reminds him of science fiction movie.
Luleå - Facebook data center in Sweden:
