Facebook Opening Wind-Powered Data Center

Facebook has started construction on its newest data center, its fifth, in Forth Worth, Texas, which the social network says will be entirely powered by renewable energy.

The new data center -- like its predecessors in Altoona, Iowa; Prinvelle, Ore.; Forest City, NC; and Lulea, Sweden -- will focus on efficiency and sustainability.

"Thanks to our continued focus on efficiency and our investments in renewables in recent years, the impact of one person's use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte," Facebook Infrastructure VP Tom Furlong said in a statement.

Facebook's work with data center design and other infrastructure efficiency have helped the company save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the past three years, the statement says.

In choosing a location for a data center, Facebook looks for a "shovel-ready site with access to renewable energy, partnerships with the local community and a strong pool of local talent for construction and long-term operations staff," Ken Patchett, Facebook director of Data Center Operations, West Region, added in a statement on the Fort Worth Data Center's Facebook page.

The Fort Worth data center will incorporate Facebook's Open Compute Project hardware designs, including the Yosemite compute server, and Wedge and six-pack switches.

Facebook's Wedge is a top-of-rack switch that the social network has submitted to the OCP for open sourcing. 6-pack is a modular switch made up of 12 switching elements based on Wedge. (See Facebook in Production Testing of Open 'Wedge' Switch.)

Yosemite is a system-on-a-chip compute server designed to improve speed and serve Facebook traffic more efficiently. Facebook designed the server in conjunction with Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) and Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: MLNX). (See Facebook Releases Data Center Tech.)

The Fort Worth Data Center will be cooled using outdoor air instead of energy-intensive air conditioners. "Yes, we can make that work, even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas," Patchett writes.

The new data center will be powered by 100% renewable energy, due to 200 MW of new wind energy Facebook is bringing to the Texas grid as part of the deal, in partnership with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation and Starwood Energy group.

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Find out more about key developments related to the systems and technologies deployed in data centers on Light Reading's Data Center Infrastructure Channel.

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Construction on the renewable energy project has begun on a 17,000-acre site in Clay County, 90 miles from the data center, "and we expect it to begin delivering clean energy to the grid by 2016," Patchett says. "200 MW is more energy than we will need for the foreseeable future."

Facebook relies on SDN and open source to power its service. It uses open source not just for software, but also for hardware design, through the Open Compute Project, which it co-founded. It builds its data centers around networking, using a non-hierarchical "fabric" of server pods with high-performance connectivity between them. (See Facebook Reinvents Data Center Networking.)

— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected]