Now that Facebook has announced Iowa, where will they build next?

May 10, 2013 Dave Ohara

I forgot to post about the Facebook Iowa data center, and just sent this up a month late. :-)

The next interesting question is where Facebook will build next. I have some theories and I'll send some e-mails to some buddies and we'll chat about it next week. Then we'll see if I was right or wrong in about 6 - 9 months.

Speculating about Facebook's data centers in the media just makes things worse for everyone, except the media companies that are only interested in traffic. I don't think anyone has found that an early media disclosure of their data center plans has helped them.

So what's in this new Facebook Iowa Data Center?

May 10, 2013 Dave Ohara

I meant to post this, but forgot to send it back in April. Oh well, I need to put this up so I can make a point with my next post. :-)

**********************

It's been interesting watching the news on the new Facebook Iowa Data Center. It was big news for many, but I knew about the Facebook Midwest Data Center back in January.

It's been so long ago, I can't even remember how I found out about the new Facebook data center. I didn't share my discovery beyond a close group of data center friends where we discussed why would Facebook build a huge data center in the midwest given their large presence in Prineville and Forest City? My friends couldn't come up with a good answer.

The one idea I threw out is Facebook is going for an Active-Active strategy. Prineville to Iowa. Forest City to Iowa. If Prineville goes down, fail over to Iowa. Same for Forest City. There is complete data redundancy between the East and West Coast to the midwest data center.

Now that Facebook Iowa Data center is public.

A New Data Center for Iowa

April 22, 2013

By Jay Parikh

Today we’re thrilled to announce that Altoona, Iowa, will be the home for Facebook’s newest data center.

There are more of us who can chat about what Facebook will put in its midwest data center and how it will interact with its other sites.

Facebook's PUE and WUE Dashboard https://www.fbpuewue.com/prineville

April 18, 2013 Dave Ohara

I found the announcement for Facebook's PUE and WUE dashboard on The Register.

Bit barn efficiency metrics on a minute-by-minute basis

By Jack Clark in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Data Center, 18th April 2013 17:00 GMT

Free whitepaper – IT infrastructure monitoring strategies

Facebook has heaped pressure on major data center operators to be more transparent, publishing a dashboard that gives up-to-the-minute figures on the efficiency of the social network's gigantic bit barns.

But, no reference to the Facebook url.

Looked at DatacenterKnowledge, again no URL for the Facebook dashboard.

Then hit GigaOm and found the URL.

The facilities are still under construction, and, as a result, the data in the two dashboards can have abnormalities, but it should become more stable over time. The company detailed its plans in a Thursday blog post on the Open Compute Project site.

With the blog post that the Register and DCK use to report.

A new way to report PUE and WUE

Thursday, April 18, 2013 · Posted by Lyrica McTiernan at 09:10 AM

Today Facebook launched two public dashboards that report continuous, near-real-time data for key efficiency metrics – specifically, PUE and WUE – for our data centers in Prineville, OR and Forest City, NC. These dashboards include both a granular look at the past 24 hours of data and a historical view of the past year’s values. In the historical view, trends within each data set and correlations between different metrics become visible. Once our data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, we’ll begin publishing for that site as well.

It is a bit ironic that in a post about transparency it took me so long to find the original FB blog post and the dashboard. https://www.fbpuewue.com/prineville with one years worth of data.

Disclosure: I work for GigaOm Pro as freelance analyst and like the fact that they embrace transparency in reporting.

Green A Data Center with Data

March 21, 2013 Dave Ohara

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham posts on the panel discussion I moderated at GigaOm Structure Data.

I want to thank Tamara Budec (Goldman Sachs), Heather Marquez (Facebook) and Amaya Souarez (Microsoft) for joining me on a great topic to discuss.

Want a better/greener/more agile data center? Use the data.

by Stacey Higginbotham

1 HOUR AGO

1 Comment

A

A

photo: Albert Chau

SUMMARY:
Want to see big data in action? When it comes to planning out data center capacity, data can influence everything from the power usage to planning for disasters.

tweet this