Facebook takes rapid approach to data centre build
Tue 1 Apr 2014
Social media giant Facebook has revealed plans to build a data centre at twice the normal speed by using its new “rapid deployment data centre” (RDDC) design, in Luleå, Sweden.
Based on the Baltic coast, Luleå was chosen as the site for the first data centre which opened last year to take advantage of the cold climate reducing the need for refrigeration inside the facility, and the proximity of hydroelectric power.
“Construction work will commence shortly on our second data centre building, sited alongside the first,” said the company. It will cover 25,000 sq m and, said Marco Magarelli, architect, data centre R&D, for Facebook, the new approach will take “modular and lean construction principles and applies them at the scale of a Facebook data centre”.
Facebook has been running its Open Compute Project (OCP) which aims to standardise and strip down the component parts of a data centre to make them easier to implement and run. It has also been running RDDC design programme to standardise the construction so that it “would look less like a construction project and more like a manufactured product.”
Facebook expects its approach to data centre design will allow it to construct and commission the site in half the time of traditional approaches.
For more information: http://www.opencompute.org/blog/author/Marco%20Magarelli
