Facebook to share green secrets

Social networking site Facebook says it will share the design secrets behind its new energy-efficient data centre with rival companies, writes.

The social network's facility in Prineville, Oregon, is said to use 38% less power than existing centres. It hopes, by making the innovations public, to cut the amount of electricity the industry consumes.

Despite Facebook's advances, some environmental groups have criticised the firm over its green credentials. Working under the title Open Compute Project, Facebook will release specifications and mechanical drawings of the building and its servers.

“It's time to stop treating data centres like Fight Club [not talking about them],” says Jonathan Heiliger, the company's VP of technical operations.

His comments are likely to be interpreted as a dig at other Web firms, such as Google, Twitter and Amazon, which have kept their own designs under wraps.

According to Greener Ideal, they admitted to 'borrowing' ideas from its predecessors to build the new energy efficient server technology, which it will be putting into place at its data centres this year.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says the data centre residing in Oregon will have a power usage ratio of 1.07 (in comparison, Google has reached 1.1, and defined 'state of the art' as 1.2). The report says Facebook is clearly ahead of the game when it comes to energy efficient technologies, claiming the new servers will be 38% more energy efficient than previous server models.

However, there are questions about whether the social network is going to abandon coal. Although Facebook's technology has been in the works for some time, its announcement comes at a time when Greenpeace is campaigning for Facebook to go green and stop using coal power by Earth Day 2011.

There has been enough publicity about the campaign that there is no doubt Facebook's founder has caught wind of the campaign, but as yet has made no mention of it. Regardless of whether Facebook will 'unfriend coal' by 22 April, the new energy efficient server technology they have created will have a significant impact on their business, and through sharing the technology, hopefully other businesses as well.

“Overall, what we've done is figured out just one way to do large-scale computing affordably and efficiently, with a particular focus on developing solutions that accommodate our limited resources - both money and people - and our unwillingness to sacrifice computing power and efficiency,” Facebook spokesperson Jonny Thaw told TechNewsWorld.