Facebook Will Ice Backup Data in ‘Sub-Zero’ Building

The mini data center it’s building right beside its 330,000-square-foot Prineville, Oregon, facility It’s reinventing the way it does emergency backup. The plan is to use the building to house a brand-new type of low-power deep-storage device that Facebook engineers will cook up over the next six to nine months. They’re designing a hard-disk storage server that powers off when it’s not in use, says Tom Furlong, vice president of site operations at Facebook. “It’s going to sit in a dedicated building that is optimized to support this device that we don’t need to access very often.” The company disclosed the existence of the new building in recently filed planning permits. In the permits, Facebook called the building Sub-Zero, though Furlong says he’s not using that name in public In addition to the 62,000-square-foot Sub-Zero building, Facebook is in the process of building a second 330,000-square-foot data center in Prineville. Just down the road from the Facebook facility, Apple is constructing its own dataplex, this one with 500,000 square feet of server-rack space. Sub-Zero will do the kind of large-scale deep archiving that some companies still achieve with tape backup. “You have one that is pretty readily accessible, and you have one that does not need

to be accessed except in the event of a true restore,” says Furlong. They hope to seriously cut power consumption with Sub-Zero. Right now a rack of Facebook servers burns about 4.5 kilowatts. In the Sub-Zero data center, the goal is to drop this to around 1.5 kW. Facebook wants to add a second Sub-Zero-type storage facility next to its Forest City, North Carolina, data center, Furlong says. Data Center Talk updates its resources everyday. Visit us to know of the latest technology and standards from the data center world. Please leave your views and comments on DCT Forum