Facebook Breaks Ground in Oregon on First Custom Data Center

This investment creates jobs across a variety of fields... -Facebook's Jonathan Heiliger

(PRINEVILLE, Ore.) - Prineville, Oregon will be the home of Facebook's first Customer data center. It will employ construction crews in the beginning and around 35 permanent employees after completion.

News released about this development today by Facebook's Jonathan Heiliger, the group's vice president of technical operations, is well received by elected officials like Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who applauded today’s announcement by Facebook, Inc. about the LEED certified data center in Prineville.

Jonathan Heiliger says they have come a long way since their early days in a Harvard dorm room, when Facebook was only available at some colleges and run on a single server.

"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. An important step along the way is to build a custom data center so that we can design it to meet our unique needs."

Today's groundbreaking on the first custom data center in Prineville included a ceremony with local officials. Heiliger says they are designing a facility that will be highly efficient and cost-effective, that will be ideal for operations today and into the future.

"When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server. However, as the site expanded to different colleges around the U.S., we needed to add more servers and data center capacity to keep up with the increasing number of people who were joining every day."

He says in the beginning, they did what so many other Internet startups do; they leased data center space along with other companies in the same building. As the user base continued to grow, Facebook developed into a much richer service, Heiliger said.

"We reached the point where it was more efficient to lease entire buildings on our own. We are now ready to build our own."

Oregon’s Jeff Merkley says today’s announcement by Facebook is fantastic news for the state, especially the immediate construction jobs, and the future permanent positions.

“Facebook’s exciting investment means more jobs for an area that urgently needs them,” Merkley said.

“As our economy relies more and more on innovative technology companies, those companies are relying more on Oregon. This investment creates jobs across a variety of fields, from computer engineers, to technicians to food service professionals. I’m delighted to hear that not only is Facebook creating jobs, but designing LEED certified buildings. This investment strengthens Oregon’s economy and its leadership in sustainability.”

Jonathan Heiliger says it is important to understand what a data center is and how it impacts your Facebook experience. "A data center is a central location that houses thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Think of a data center as essentially one very large computer that contains the collective computing infrastructure to make web properties, like Facebook, work."

He says that when a person creates a profile on Facebook, the information they share is captured in servers located in a data center.

"So when you update your status, post and comment on photos or videos or otherwise communicate with friends, these servers receive your actions, compute them, and then act quickly so that you see your actions completed in seconds."

"Along with making sure Facebook operates quickly for you, we wanted to minimize the environmental impact of our new facility and its energy costs," Heiliger said.

To best achieve those goals, he explained how Facebook Inc. will use several energy-efficiency technologies, including:

* Evaporative cooling system: This system evaporates water to cool the incoming air, as opposed to traditional chiller systems that require more energy intensive equipment. This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air.

* Airside economizer: The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside. This feature will operate for between 60 percent and 70 percent of the year. The remainder of the year requires the use of the evaporative cooling system to meet temperature and humidity requirements.

* Re-use of server heat: A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and used to heat office space in the facility during the colder months.

* Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology: All data centers must have an uninterruptible power supply to continuously provide power to servers. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent.

Heiliger says the new data center is another example of their investment to meet the needs of the growing number of people using Facebook and to deliver richer and more innovative services.

"The new data center will help us by adding more computing and storage capacity, which we expect to help us deliver a faster, more reliable experience worldwide."

This he says, is just one step in the creation of a long term business that will support Facebook users, developers and advertisers.

Special thanks to Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations, who is always expanding behind-the-scenes infrastructure. You can visit his blog to learn more: blog.facebook.com/

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com