Skip to main content
[aditude-amp id="stickyleaderboard" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":354046,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"D"}']
That right there? That's you "liking" your aunt's new sheep on Farmville.
Image Credit: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat
It all started with two engineers sketching on this napkin...
Construction on the Prineville center started in January 2010.
The Prineville gnome garden stands in "gnome-man's land" and leads to lots of punny "gnomenclature."
Ken Patchett is the site operations manager for the Prineville facility. He's been managing data centers since 1998 & has worked at Google and Microsoft facilities in the past.
The facility has 14 semi-truck-sized generators in case of electrical grid failure.
Each generator building houses these diesel-burning engines.
Most of the data center's power comes from the local power utility, but some comes from this solar array set up next to the building.
On the left, Open Compute machines do data processing. On the right, ODM boxes store your profile information.
That right there? That's you "liking" your aunt's new sheep on Farmville.
These are the Open Compute machines - open-source hardware that anyone can see specs for and potentially improve on.
The facility is guarded by 27 people - that's about half its total full-time staff.
On the Open Compute machines, you'll find no screws. They require no tools at all for assembly or repair.
Tens of thousands of servers exist in this one building, and many more buildings are going to be built around the world for Facebook's use.
This caged, locked area contains the servers that store and process financial data for Facebook Credits transactions.
At the far end of the server room is a giant "Like" button that lights up when you push it -- a two-hands kind of task due to its size.
These "crash carts" roll along the aisles of servers. As Patchett put it, you don't want to have to run a half mile back to a desk when you really need a screwdriver.
These vents pull in huge amounts of air to cool the facility. All those bits traveling through wires generate a lot of heat.
Once the air flows into the second floor space above the server room, it gets pulled through this wall of filters.
After being filtered, the air gets pulled through a bath of fine mist for cooler temperatures and higher humidity.
Finally, the cool, damp air is sucked through a wall of stark, white fans and is allowed to fall into the server room, where it helps cool the machines that house your profile.
That's just one building. Facebook is building two more in Prineville and other data centers around the world.
1 / 21
Your Facebook profile doesn’t exist on your computer or in some nebulous cloud called “the Internet.”
It’s stored deep in the brick-and-mortar walls of real-world fortresses. It comes to life as electricity flows through wires that connect tens of thousands of servers to the grid.
And for some users some of the time, it lives among the wind and scrub brush of central Oregon, where Facebook has erected its first fully functioning data center in a town called Prineville.
The still-young company leases equipment and facilities at various locations, but the Prineville center is something special. Facebook designed and built this place from the ground up. More interestingly, it’s shared its customized hardware designs and super-efficient operational specs with anyone who wants to see them.
AI Weekly
The must-read newsletter for AI and Big Data industry written by Khari Johnson, Kyle Wiggers, and Seth Colaner.
Included with VentureBeat Insider and VentureBeat VIP memberships.
Yesterday, we spent the afternoon poking our nose around Facebook’s Prineville data center. We’ll have a longer video tour of the place posted soon, but we wanted to share the images from the trip as soon as possible.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More
