
Photo tour of Facebook’s new datacenter - creativityhurts
http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacenter/
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cmelbye
Very cool, but why in the world would he use Instagram? All it did was crop
the photo down to a square, so we couldn't see parts of the datacenter that
weren't within that square.

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Scobleizer
I use Instagram because I have about 10,000 followers on that service. I go
where my friends are.

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JeremyBanks
It seems silly for the quality of the photos in your article to be impacted by
the way you share them on a social network.

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chuhnk
Rackspace are building a datacenter based on the opencompute plans, very cool.
Exactly what I had thought about based on the announcement of open compute.
Hosting companies, large companies and all sorts will be leveraging this
information to increase the scale of computing in datacenters as a whole. I
hope more companies will contribute to opencompute so we continue to see
improvements like this. The facebook datacenter looks awesome, as you can see
they are serious about being a long term company rivalling the likes of
google.

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maukdaddy
This is absolutely fantastic. I've been following the Google datacenter
efficiency project for a while, and an opensource competitor will only make
things better for the world. I can't wait for the day when more large
companies either embrace this concept for their own datacenters or outsource
to datacenters built on these technologies.

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torstesu
How can this be more energy efficient than systems using cold ocean water to
dump the heat surplus? E.g. The datacenters in iceland, where Opera has its
datacenters. Would love some more details.

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Nitramp
Discharging heat into nature is considered pollution by many countries by now,
and in particular discharging it into bodies of water. You might simply not be
allowed to do that, or you might have to pay hefty pollution taxes.

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ghshephard
"Discharging heat into nature is considered pollution by many countries by
now" - Citation please. I'm not doubting you, this is just the first I've
heard that discharging heat into nature is considered "pollution.", and I'd be
interested to hear the context. I suspect it's in rare scenarios where the
water it's being discharged into has a limited heat sink (small lake/river?)
Regardless, I find it highly dubious that discharging heat _from a data center
into an ocean_ is considered pollution by any country in the world. And I'm
willing to wager no country in the world charges hefty pollution taxes for
doing so. In fact, I'd be surprised if anyone, ever, has been charged
pollution taxes for discharging heat into the ocean. The ocean is pretty big.
The United States, in an entire year, uses enough energy to only equal 1% of
what the Sun does every day in terms of heat loading.

From:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Su...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Sun)

"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses
is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year."

1/365 of 3,850,000 exajoules = approx 10,000 exajoules.

From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule>, " Energy in the United States used
per year is roughly 105 EJ."

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pauldino
In the US, the Clean Water Act covers thermal pollution (well, "thermal
discharges"), and based on the language it looks like the provisions have been
present since 1972. <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/33/1326.html>

Actually I'm a bit surprised this isn't that well known with the recent focus
on nuclear power, since thermal pollution and cooling system intakes that kill
fish have been a minor source of controversy for some plants, including Indian
Point and Vermont Yankee. Recent news on the latter:
[http://vermont4evolution.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/anr-to-
rev...](http://vermont4evolution.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/anr-to-review-
vermont-yankee%E2%80%99s-water-discharge-permit/)

And just for convenience here are the first few results off Google for thermal
pollution:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution>

<http://www.pollutionissues.com/Te-Un/Thermal-Pollution.html>

[http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotech-
Environ/Environment...](http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotech-
Environ/Environmental/THERMAL/tte1.htm)

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ghshephard
Thanks - I think it's important to note that the citations you mentioned don't
treat the discharge as "Pollution", per se, but instead discuss what the
impacts of the discharge is. That is, there's no limit on what you can
discharge (as there is with pollution), but instead a limitation on the damage
you can do to the local ecosystem.

I'd be interested in knowing if any country has adapted statutes with regards
to treating thermal discharges as pollutants that need to be regulated. I'm
guessing, based mostly on the pre-existing scale of heat loading from the sun,
that thermal discharges are not considered to be a pollutant by any country,
and you are free to discharge as much of it as you want, just as long as you
don't damage the fish/shellfish/wildlife in the area. This also suggests if
there are no fish/shellfish/wildlife in your discharge area, you are free to
discharge as much as you want.

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rayiner
The EPA defines "pollutant" for the purposes of the Clean Water Act as:

Pollutant means dredged spoil, solid waste, incinerator residue, filter
backwash, sewage, garbage, sewage sludge, munitions, chemical wastes,
biological materials, radioactive materials... heat... 14 C.F.R. § 122.2
(definition of "pollutant").

EPA discharge permits, which are required to discharge any pollutant in any
amount into US waters, certainly do regulate thermal discharges.

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martincmartin
_Which brought up the question: why Prineville. ... low tax rates and friendly
climate to business, etc._

In other words, whatever labor is needed is considered unskilled. You found a
tech company in the Valley, NYC or Boston because, even though the costs are
high, that's where you can attract the talent. When the quality of employees
is a non-issue, you may as well place it in a place that's economically
depressed, i.e. desperate.

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forkandwait
I would imagine they will be importing most of the talent -- either from
Portland, (inter)nationally, or at least from Bend or Eugene or Corvallis. My
guess is that it really is the taxes + land costs + electricity costs +
environment (cool high desert is great for evap cooling). Also Oregon has good
business taxes, if high income tax. Finally, there is good skiing nearby at
Bachelor, nearby Redmond has a great airport, etc.

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forkandwait
Just a note: In the high desert, "evaporative cooling" (all those water jets,
fans, and filters) are refered to as "swamp coolers". Much more poetic.

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jpitz
Y'all should know that we good ol southern folk calls em that too.

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soundlab
Note the dual axis solar trackers in the field adjacent the facility. They are
from Bend, OR solar startup PV Trackers <http://www.pvtrackers.com/>

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davidw
Being from Oregon, I always get a kick out of seeing this... Facebook, in
_Prineville_. It's a small town that's not much of anywhere. Previously, it
was known as the HQ of Les Schwab (free beef!) Tires, but even they moved over
to Bend.

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forkandwait
I knew someone who worked at the Les Schwab HQ. She said that as soon as it
was seemly after he passed away, they moved the operation to Bend. I can
imagine an interview -- "Look, we want to hire you from Stanford Business
School to run this multimillion section of our company, but Les is 85 and as
soon as he goes we PROMISE we are moving to Bend."

Note -- this may seem sort of horrible, but I am under the impression that Les
was the sort of guy to be completely face forward, and could say "Look -- I
know you all want to move to a town with a Starbucks, but you just have to
wait until I die. And then please keep donating money to the local football
team when I go."

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davidw
Looks like he was a pretty good guy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Schwab>

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akent
I wonder why there are at least two ridiculously big (like, 4096 pixels wide?)
embedded images that are forced to width=500 in the HTML? Ever heard of
thumbnails?

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ck2
So this is fun to look at, but considering how datacenters are supposed to be
secure, isn't this counterproductive to them?

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ghshephard
Two facts:

#1. Nobody attacks data centers. No, really, they don't. Have some solid
concrete walls, a man trap for people entry. a secure receiving area, and make
sure your external doors are locked and you now have more security than is
required for any data center short of critical infrastructure (nuclear/air-
safety) - and probably enough for that as well.

#2. Even if people attacked data centers (which, honestly, they don't) - there
was nothing in these tours that would increase their odds of successfully
doing so. Much easier to just get a job there if you really had some desire to
cause damage.

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ck2
I know of two datacenter "attacks".

However they were inside jobs by disgruntled former employees which I know
disqualifies my original concern.

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ghshephard
Oh, I've been involved in several incidents in Data Centers -but they all were
a result of people who had been legitimately been let in to the data center.
Contractors, Electricians, Customers, Telcos.

In the entire history of data centers, I'd be surprised if there's been more
than a dozen external penetrations on a data center that had the following:

    
    
      o Solid Concrete walls.
      o Man Traps w/security that vets all entry.
      o External Locking Doors that are always Locked.
      o Secure Shipping and Receiving (Basically Rolling Doors 
        that lead into a "Package Trap" for gear where it is 
        deboxed)
      o And, I should have also mentioned, customer cages.  
    

On the flip side, I'm betting we could find thousands, and more likely tens of
thousands, of incidents related to people who had been let in through proper
channels. If you want to invest effort in securing your data center, that's
where you'll get the biggest payoff.

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mrmuhacks
would be even more interesting if a tech person could do a tour/photoshoot
instead of a non-technical buzzhound.

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fedd
do all/many queries to facebook go to Prineville and how physically? shouldn't
datacenters be in the middle of some thick cable hub?

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jacques_chester
The article explains that Prineville is a railroad town.

Some time back most railroads switched to using fibre optics for signalling
purposes, not least because copper requires more repeaters and is more likely
to be dug up by dickheads.

The amount of bandwidth needed for railroad signalling is pretty minimal, so
many railroad companies now moonlight as telcos.

Also, back in the 1990s, a lot of firms laid additional fibre along the
railroads because of the existing rights-of-way. Laying alongside a railroad
is much faster because the legalities are settled -- you only need to
negotiate with one organisation, not every little county you happen to cross.

Consequently there is a lot of spare capacity running along railroads.

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rhizome
_By the way, why did Rackspace send me there? For those who don’t know, I’m a
full-time employee of Rackspace which is the world’s biggest web hosting
company._

Scoble has a day job at Rackspace?

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Scobleizer
Yes. Here's what I do at Rackspace: [http://www.quora.com/What-does-Robert-
Scoble-do-at-Rackspace...](http://www.quora.com/What-does-Robert-Scoble-do-at-
Rackspace?q=Scoble+Rackspace)

~~~
rhizome
Nice query-spam suffix. Nothing personal, but it sounds less like a day job
and more like a retainer for you to give RS presentations/info based on your
normal travels.

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wefqwerq
Why is a corporate guy wearing a jacket showing the datacenter ? Doesn't
represent the startup spirit IMHO.

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daveman692
Because that's how Tom dresses. He's not a "corporate guy" but manages the
team who runs our data centers and was directly involved in building this one.

