Facebook opens its first data centre

Facebook is opening its first data centre after years of renting server capacity from other companies.

The company, now with 350 million users, said it would be more cost efficient to lease entire buildings of its own.

The new data centre will be located in Prineville, Oregon and will include energy-efficient technology, such as an evaporative cooling system and a system that re-uses server heat.

“When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server,” said Facebook technical operations vice president, Jonathan Heiliger in the company blog.

“However, as the site expanded to different colleges around the U.S., we needed to add more servers and data center capacity to keep up with the increasing number of people who were joining every day.”

“The new data center will help us by adding more computing and storage capacity, which we expect to help us deliver a faster, more reliable experience worldwide.”

“This is just one step along the way in building a business for the long term and dedicating resources to scale our site to support our users, developers and advertisers,” Heiliger said.