As one of the world’s largest purveyors of online information, Facebook is continually updating its data center cooling system in an effort to increase cooling efficiency while maintaining current costs. Facebook’s original data center in Prineville, Ore. was designed for the desert and takes advantage of the low temperatures and humidity to cool its hardware with outside air. Temperatures in Prineville remain low for most of the year; during the summer daylight hours, Facebook supplements fresh air cooling with a misting system.
A second data recently center erected in Forest City, N.C. utilizes similar methods of cooling; however, additional equipment was installed to reduce the humidity if needed. In the first building of its data center campus in North Carolina, a misting system made of small nozzles attached to water pipes was installed to cool the air and add humidity, while in the second data center building, an evaporative cooling system featuring adiabatic media was utilized.
Facebook’s data center design uses a two-tier structure to suspend the cooling infrastructure above the servers and take advantage of the “natural tendency for cold air to fall and hot air to rise.” The two-tier structure design eliminates the need to force cool air up through an elevated floor using air pressure.
Facebook hopes to encourage the expansion of “free-cooled” data centers by continuing to disclose information pertaining to its data center efficiency measures.
Take a look at the related story published in the December issue of Electronics Cooling Magazine!
For more information, visit Wired and Data Center Knowledge.
