A Look Inside a Facebook Data Center

[OyaYansa]

Zuckerberg recently posted in his Facebook profile a full photo report revealing the inside of one of its most unique data centers, being located in the sweltering Swedish region of Luleå, just 100 km Arctic Circle.

And is that Facebook has always been committed to a policy of transparency (or at least to appear, since, like any large corporation, has much information that does not reveal). It is rare the week that the social network does not lead some news of today, either by a change of its algorithm or a new service for advertisers.

Boasting this corporate and communicative strategy, Facebook has no share in showing what is behind the scenes, spaces that only those who work in the company can see or access. As for example the data center, spaces with great measures of security and inside of which the companies keep the most valuable thing that they have: the data.

Something that in the case of Facebook is increased, because thanks to them their gigantic advertising machinery can continue to work and generating multi-million dollar revenues.

A recent TechCrunch report revealed the inside of a Facebook data center, specifically Prineville (Oregon), the first to build the Zuckerberg company to store information.

Usually these buildings have the appearance of an industrial warehouse and go unnoticed by the pedestrians. Unless you are Facebook, you then conveniently sign it.

Data centers-fecabook
Although the choice of a desert does not seem the most appropriate for a data center, Facebook located it here to take advantage of solar energy and with it provide cooling systems. Prineville has a po[CENSORED]tion of about 8,000 inhabitants, so it is not surprising that the social network is the main employer; In addition it is responsible for providing other services that have nothing to do with technology, such as water or light. Something that the inhabitants of the region do not hesitate to thank with banners like this one.

As we said before, despite the transparency of the company, there are many other things that Facebook does not show the public. It is the case of data destruction rooms, present in this and other dating center, and where it destroys the data that it will no longer employ or to which it will give another use.

In every corridor of the Facebook data center in Prineville there are a dozen servers that store user data. All of them are open source and predominantly blue because they use LED lighting, which consumes less.

The cooling system of this Facebook data center is different from that used by other companies because it is not based on air conditioning, so it is quieter. To cool the servers, the building has hot and cold walkways; In the first is the front of the servers, where the cold air enters, and the back gives the hot aisle, where the air is expelled when heated. The fans are then ejected outwards.

In addition to the traditional servers, Facebook's data center also hosts servers that work with machine learning, which are the ones that later identify faces in the photos so that you label them or guess your tastes and suggest certain publications. They are called Big Sur servers, with eight high-power graphics processors known as GPUs (manufactured by Nvidia, leading provider).

The high energy consumption of GPUs requires the design of an infrastructure designed for the cooling of the building. In addition to the hot and cold corridors, this Facebook data center has air and water rooms.

The picture below shows the outside air entrance room. It filters on the right, hits the filters on the left and so the dust does not enter; Then circulates through a cooling and evaporation system. When outside it is too cold, the building is programmed to mix it with the hot air that gives off the rooms of the servants.

In the building that is seen in this photograph, Facebook stores data and information of its users that have fallen into disuse; For example, photographs or videos that have long been receiving no interactions of any kind. There the "cold storage" is carried out, since the servers that it contains are dormant, storing that information, until somebody returns to resort to it.

Outside the main building we also find powerful and generous power generators, to supply the data center in case of power failure and so that the servers continue to operate with total normality.

If we return to the building intended for "cold storage" we see that there is also a space for laboratory tests. Basically it is about several dozen autonomous racks with mobile devices, where they are testing the latest versions and updates that are then implemented in the Facebook app.

[El L0rd]

Thanks for you hard work. 

But this post already exist  since January 01 . 

Quote

2.2 Use 'Search' before opening a topic as there may already be a topic containing the same subject.

Please Keep your good work ! .