LinkedIn has opened a new data center in Hillsboro, Ore., showcasing principles of cloud architecture and energy efficiency.

Opening on the verge of LinkedIn's $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), the 8-megawatt, 36,000-square foot facility is designed to meet LinkedIn's needs for future growth, while connecting LinkedIn Corp. to a diversity of network providers and the Asia-Pacific region through proximity to the Trans Pacific Cable Landing Station, Mike Yamaguchi, LinkedIn's director of data center engineering, tells Light Reading.

The Oregon location also gives the data center 220 days of free cooling, with connectivity to renewable energy using the Portland General Electric Infrastructure.

Figure 1: Be Cool Rear door heat exchangers in LinkedIn's new Hillsboro, Ore., data center free LinkedIn from having to build using the traditional hot aisle/cold aisle architecture, where server racks are lined up front-to-front to manage air flow and cooling.

"There were a lot of significant reasons why we opted for Oregon. But what we're really excited about is what's contained within," Yamaguchi says. "It is our most technologically advanced and efficient data center."

Hosted by Infomart, the data center includes scalable data center fabric technology that LinkedIn calls Project Altair, says Shawn Zandi, LinkedIn's principal network architect. LinkedIn is getting away from large chassis switches to 1 rack pizza-box switches for scalability. The data center is moving to 100 Gbit/s for all links.

LinkedIn is implementing disaggregated software on its own 100Gbit/s Ethernet switch platform, called Project Falco, to provide greater flexibility and uniform software on multiple varieties of hardware.

The data center implements LinkedIn Platform-as-a-Service cloud architecture, providing a single resource pool for applications, so that any server can be used for any workload. "We can easily deploy resources in a matter of minutes instead of hours, improving our provisioning time," Zandi says.

Additionally, LinkedIn moved to IPv6, for added flexibility, and a distributed firewall architecture to eliminate the need to deploy specialized appliances, Zandi said.

We wrote about LinkedIn's plans for Project Altair and the Oregon data center in depth in April: LinkedIn Launches Private Cloud for Growth.

Microsoft plans to acquire LinkedIn this quarter. LinkedIn declined to comment on how the acquisition will affect its technology infrastructure. (See Microsoft & LinkedIn: Marriage Made in the Cloud and Under Microsoft, LinkedIn's Big Cloud Plans Face Uncertain Future.)

LinkedIn produced a video tour of the data center:

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud