DPC of Facebook

The Facebook company constructed the first own data processing center in the State of Oregon. Except design of DPC and the subsequent organization of its administration, specialists of the company had to solve the special problems connected with transition to own infrastructure. (On materials SMALLPOX)

Facebook told about how preliminary testing of all program infrastructure of the company under loading was held. For this purpose in Virginia, in opposite from the Region of Oregon of the USA, the huge cluster of the operating servers was rented.

The fact that Facebook could dare to construct own DPC eloquently shows how large became the company. It also testifies to that, the need for minimization of interruptions in work is how big at the fast-growing websites of social networks.

To specialists of Facebook notifications on news, the search mechanism and banner network out of the former infrastructure consisting of two data processing centers were not necessary to test the service yet. As the representative of the company Sandzhiv Kumar emphasized, it was necessary to take care of that all program stack of Facebook could work and develop perfectly in new conditions without interruption of daily activity of users of social network.

"We decided to simulate the third data processing center still before new servers in Prineville were put into operation. We gave a test project the name Triforce" — Kumar tells. Facebook rented a server cluster in Virginia and configured it as the "third region". Specialists of the company developed the software package under the name Kobold which, according to Kumar, allowed to create and disband quickly clusters, to hold testing under loading and tests of power without influence on the user traffic and with audit control of each of stages.

Thanks to Kobold specialists of the company could load images of the necessary software on tens of thousands of servers and put them into operation less than in a month.

"Prior to passing of working traffic of Facebook through new DPC there passed less than two months — Kumar noted. — Usually working traffic in the companies gets better manually a large number of people, and this process takes several weeks. To us now only one person who performs necessary operations less than in 10 minutes for this purpose suffices".

On April 19, 2012 Facebook announced opening of the second DPC in the territory of the USA, an object was placed in the town of Forest-City in the State of North Carolina. It already is under loading and its capacities are used for service of real users of social network. One more American DPC of Facebook is in Prinvil, the State of Oregon.

The new DPC integrates two buildings. Only one of them is still put into operation, its construction began in November, 2010. The second premises will be involved until the end of the year, it will become mirror repetition of the first. For last 16 months from the moment of the beginning of construction over 1.2 million working hours about 2 thousand of specialists were spent.

In October, 2011 Facebook announced creation of the Open Compute Project (OCP) organization which should promote implementation in different DPC of modern technologies. Increase in energy efficiency became especially important aspect of the detailed program. Representatives of Facebook say that the DPC in Forest-City has a set of advantages, and they by right can be proud of it. Three are most remarkable:

• DPCs in Forest-City and Prinvil are considered as one of the most energy efficient in the world. The performance indicator of use of energy of PuE (Power utilization Effectiveness) in them lies within 1.06-1.08;

• this first large-scale implementation of OCP Web servers of the second generation which in turn some of the first are constructed based on the new Intel processors Sandy Bridge;

• in DPC in Forest-City the air cooling system developed by OCP will pass the first overload tests. Its design assumes functioning of computing infrastructure outside parameter values of temperature and humidity, typical for DPC.

Let's remind, at the end of last year Facebook announced intention to construct DPC outside the USA. Presumably, the server farm will be located in the city of Lulea in the north of Sweden, in 100 kilometers from the Polar circle. Such arrangement will allow to cool the equipment with air from the street: average annual temperature in this area is about 2 Celsius degrees.