How Facebook puts petabytes of old cat pix on ice in the name of sustainability

Rows of Open Compute Project racks in a Facebook data center. (credit: Facebook)

When someone says the word "sustainability," the first thing that leaps into your mind is not a data center. These giant buildings full of computer, network, and storage gear are typically power-hungry behemoths with giant cooling systems that keep servers happy and chilled. Their power distribution systems lose kilowatts just shifting electricity from one form to another. And the farms of environmentally unfriendly backup batteries and diesel backup generators on site are there to nurse things along if the power all this demands suddenly disappears.

A number of Internet giants have gone to great lengths to change that-building their own data centers and even building their own hardware in an effort to make their ever-ballooning fleet of data centers more environmentally friendly. The upside for them is lower operating costs and a better relationship with the communities they operate in. But for some of these companies, it goes beyond that. Facebook has been among the most aggressive in its efforts to green the data center and bring much of the industry along with them by open-sourcing technology developed by the company and leading initiatives to develop renewable energy sources for data centers and other operations.

All of this started about eight years ago, when Facebook began designing its very first built-to-suit data center in Prineville, Oregon (it later opened in 2011). Since then, the company has hired a director of sustainability, Bill Weihl, to direct Facebook's green efforts. "Around the time I joined Facebook," Weihl told Ars, "we started looking at where our energy comes from. We use a lot of energy and want to make sure it's as clean as possible."

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