Facebook's new Prineville data center touts efficiency

Facebook on Thursday said it will build a 147,000-square-foot data center in Prineville. The project will cost $180 million.

It will be the first corporate-owned data center for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, the world’s largest social networking service with more than 350 million users.

The data center will be used to store and route information posted by Facebook users. It will employ 200 workers during its 12 months of construction and another 35 full-time once operating.

Tom Furlong, Facebook’s director of site operations, said the company underwent a “rigorous review process.” But Prineville offered the best set of elements, including a good climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources.

Data centers are notoriously power hungry operations, employing banks of computer servers that need to be continually cooled.

The Facebook building is designed to meet the gold standard for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The energy efficiency measures touted by the company include:

• Evaporative cooling system – Using evaporation of water toachieve cooling as opposed to the more traditional chiller systems that requires more energy intensive equipment.

• Airside economizer – The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside.

• Re-use of server heat – A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and re-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 and the Prineville Data Center will use a new, patent-pending system for UPS that reduces electricity usage by up to 12 percent.

A news release from Kulongoski said it will be one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the United States. It will be served by Pacific Power’s portfolio of renewable energy resources.

Naturally, the new data center has its own Facebook page: www.facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter.