Along with the rest of the OSU Open Source Lab crew (including students), I was invited to the grand opening of Facebook’s new datacenter yesterday in Prineville, Oregon. We were lucky enough to get a private tour by Facebook’s Senior Open Source Manager, David Recordon. I was very impressed with the facility on many levels.

I was glad I was able to get a close look at their Open Compute servers and racks in person. They were quite impressive. One triplet rack can hold ninty 1.5U servers which can add up quickly. We’re hoping to get one or two of these racks at the OSL. I hope they fit as those triplet racks were rather tall!

Here’s a look at a bank of their web & memcached servers. You can find the memcached servers with the large banks of RAM in the front of them (72Gs in each server). The web servers were running the Intel open compute boards while the memcached servers were using AMD. The blue LED’s on the servers cost Facebook an extra $0.05 per unit compared to green LED’s.

The hot aisle is shown here and was amazing quiet. Actually, the whole room was fairly quiet which is strange compared to our datacenter. Its because of the design of the open compute servers and the fact that they are using negative/positive airflow in the whole facility to push cold/hot air.

They had a lot of generators behind the building each a size of a bus easily. You can see their substation in the background. Also note the camera in the foreground, they were everywhere not to mention security because of Green Peace.

The whole trip was amazing and was just blown away by the sheer scale. Facebook is planning on building another facility next to this one within the next year. I was really happy that all of the OSL students were able to attend the trip as well as they rarely get a chance to see something like this.

We missed seeing Mark Zuckerburg by minutes unfortunately. We had a three hour drive back and it was around 8:10PM when we left and he showed up at 8:15PM. Damnit!

If you would like to see more of the pictures I took, please check out my album below.

Thanks David for inviting us!

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