Inside the Arctic Circle, Where Your Facebook Data Live

[randomdestructn]

> with fewer components they can function at temperatures as high as 85F. (Most servers are expected to keel over at 75F.)

I'm no datacentre guy, so can someone clarify if this is a typo? What kind of electronics start failing just above room temperature?

I'd think HDDs would be the most sensitive, but google said failures aren't well correlated to hdd temp (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf‎)

[ghshephard]

This was a popular attitudes in the 80s, and 90s, until Google, Intel and others did some research and discovered that Cold data centers aren't the be-all/end-all.

After reading the research I kept on the order of 100 servers in a server room at approx. 80 degrees for a couple years, and didn't see any devices fail.

I don't think anyone in the last 10+ years has believe that "servers are expected to keel over at 75F"

[6cxs2hd6]

I think they meant C not F.

[leeoniya]

85F ambient maybe?, the components are necessarily much hotter then.

meanwhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtDuqqR_Dbg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IX9U2zaI_I

[coherentpony]

Are you sure they don't actually mean celsius, rather than fahrenheit?

[bonchibuji]

Google built one in Finland a couple of years back. They are using the sea water for cooling.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ham...

[DanBC]

> Facebook’s data center (bottom) spends nearly two-thirds less energy on power and cooling than a typical facility. The building’s upper level (top) pumps in frigid air, cooling the servers below, then vents warmer air outside

Pumping warm air outside feels really wasteful.

Is there any work on increasing efficiencies with waste heat?

[fennecfoxen]

No? It would be inefficient to put a lot of effort and capital into trying to extract useful work from a marginally-above-room-temperature exhaust stream. Something about thermodynamics and low efficiencies at small temperature gradients :P

[icegreentea]

The difficulty is that data centers don't generate "high grade heat" ie, they don't actually run very hot. While it might dissipate a lot of heat, the temperature is quite low (they claim their data center only run at ~30C). As a result, their 'waste' heat stream will never be above ~30C if they don't have anything special going on. There aren't a lot of useful things you can do with that type of heat. Even if they managed to dump it all into water and them pipe it over to surrounding housing, it's still not -that- useful, and likely not worth the cost/energy of setting up the system.

While they could also conceivably run liquid cooling to -all- of their high temperature components (CPUs and PSUs probably) to get a higher grade waste heat stream, once again, its likely not worth the energy/money to set up that system.

This is why most cogeneration or waste heat schemes are on industrial processes - their "waste" heat is pumping out at above boiling at a minimum, and far more useful.

[runamok]

I'd imagine all the waste heat that air conditioners generate to cool a traditional data center is significantly larger.

[code_duck]

As evidenced by the claimed electrical efficiency, it's a lot less wasteful than bringing in hot outside air and air conditioning it.

[coherentpony]

I don't understand what the Arctic circle has to do with this. It's a data centre, not an HPC cluster. Data centres don't run nearly as hot as clusters.

[rypskar]

I do also have a problem understanding what the Arctic Circle has to do with this. North of arctic circle in America and Scandinavia is two totally different things

[miahi]

I saw a small data center (4 racks) get from 18C to 55C in one hour when the chillers failed. And that was the air temperature, not the server temperature. In theory you can just open the doors, but then you cannot control the humidity.

[dorfsmay]

All data centres have cooling. They get cooling for free 7 months of the year!

[ztnewman]

Did you read the article? Have you ever been in a data center?

[spongle]

Probably no privacy laws there ;)

[coherentpony]

Did you mean 'ample' rather than 'no'?

'No' privacy laws => surveillance.

[mathattack]

I assume the title will get fixed. I think the interesting thing is it's located in Sweden due to power reasons.

[paulbennett]

Does pumping out heat in a cold area like this have any meaningful effect on local climate or environment?

[brryant]

There are so many typos in this article that it reads like a FB post

[hablahaha]

So I get that it might be grammatically correct to use 'Data Live', but it sounds quite strange to me, I've never actually run across this before.

[sidcool]

Arctic circle. OK. Cool.

[bestest]

nope. apparently it's article circle. (seriously though, how the hell does one mistype it like this!)

[coldcode]

Polar bears work cheap.

[dynofuz]

Great! Just what we need to accelerate the melting of the ice caps.