Facebook will be launching its first ever data centre after renting server space for nearly six years.
Jonathan Heiliger, the social networking site's vice president of technical operations, announced the company is designing a new custom data centre in Prineville, Oregon.
"We have come a long way from our roots in a Harvard dorm room, when Facebook was only available at some colleges and run on a single server," said Heiliger in a blog post.
"Now with more than 350 million people worldwide and our service and business continuing to grow, we must constantly scale our technical infrastructure to meet the demand and deliver you a fast, reliable experience."
The company is keen to make the data centre very green and as a result will include an evaporative cooling system evaporating water to cool the incoming air using cold air from outside to cool the hardware and utilising server heat to warm office space in the colder months.
It will also use a new patent-pending Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology that claims to reduce electricity use by up to 12 per cent compared to standard UPSs.
"The new data centre will help us by adding more computing and storage capacity, which we expect to help us deliver a faster, more reliable experience worldwide," added Heiliger.
"This is just one step along the way in building a business for the long term and dedicating resources to scale our site to support our users, developers and advertisers."
-
Should AI PCs be part of your next hardware refresh?AI PCs are fast becoming a business staple and a surefire way to future-proof your business
-
Westcon-Comstor and Vectra AI launch brace of new channel initiativesNews Westcon-Comstor and Vectra AI have announced the launch of two new channel growth initiatives focused on the managed security service provider (MSSP) space and AWS Marketplace.
-
Twitter ends partnership with DataSift, sparks angry rebukeNews Ex accuses Twitter of hurting customers and damaging ecosystem
-
IBM supercomputer Watson will answer questions with Twitter dataNews IBM hopes the new service will go beyond simple brand sentiment analysis
-
MWC 2014 news & reviews roundup: Everything you need to knowIn-depth As MWC 2014 draws to a close, we take a look back over the big announcements from Samsung, Nokia, Mozilla and others...
-
Facetime suffers downtimeNews Apple coughs to iMessage outage as well.
-
Fusion-io makes all flash datacentres a reality for the enterpriseNews Flash memory firm claims new product has already been trialled by Facebook.
-
Week in review: Nokia-Microsoft alliance, HP TouchPad tablet, Facebook sharesNews There are some weeks in the tech industry where absolutely nothing seems to happen. This week definitely wasn't one of them.
-
Video: Social media in businessNews
-
Social networking to overtake business email use?News Analyst firm Gartner claims social networking will become the primary form of business communication for 20 per cent of employees within the next four years.
