Facebook says new Prineville, Oregon data centre now at 1.08 PUE
Facebook’s new Prineville Data Centre in Oregon now has a PUE of 1.08, as compared to the EPA standard of 1.5 PUE for state-of-the-art data centres, the company said.
According to a manager of the facility, Ken Patchett, the site is now 72% more efficient than typical data centres out there, which gives Facebook more of what he calls, “negawatts” or the energy not use by the data centre.
Energy efficient measures at the site range from passive infrastructure elements such as motion-sensor enabled LED lighting, to a water capture and reclaimed system that collects all the rain water on its roof, as well as moisture from condensation at the site.
The site is also the home to the first large scale deployment of Facebook’s Open Compute servers, which leverage a number of energy efficient architectural elements on the IT stack to drive energy savings, including parallel-sourced UPS systems that support both AC and DC modes, and trimmed down, low energy servers. All that makes the Open Compute servers 38% more efficient to power and 24% less costly to built compared to standard servers, according to Patchett.
Patchett added that Prineville’s cool climate during the winter means that the site spends very little resources in cooling the servers during that time of year. In fact, Patchett says that during the winter, the heat generated by the servers during the winter is actually recirculated as heating for the rest of the facility. The site is configured via hot and cold aisles, which can differed in temperatures of between 30-35 degrees Fahrenheit.
Obviously, the site has a series of sophisticated ventilation systems that move cool or warm air when they need to go, but use of actual fans are minimised, with the majority of the system relaying on natural free air flow.
Other green initiatives at the site include an solar panel array that is expected to generate enough energy to support the electricity requirements of the site’s offices, as well as the use of local materials to minimise the carbon footprint from the import of raw materials, Patchett said.
Category: Applications, Climate change, Cloud computing, Data centres, Green corporations, Green ICT
