The node pole: inside Facebook's Swedish hub near the Arctic Circle
Welcome to the Node Pole, a hi-tech hub in Luleå, northern Sweden, and the site of Facebook's first datacentre outside the US. The warehouse opened in 2013 and is set amid a green pine forest, lakes and an archipelago. The Arctic Circle is just down the road. A second centre next door is due to be completed later this year.
Facebook has four giant datacentres in the US, its newest at Fort Worth in Texas. The construction of the Swedish data halls is in response to the huge amounts of electronic data being generated around the world, at a rate that doubles roughly every 18 months. In Facebook's case, this means 350m photographs a day, 4.5bn likes and 10bn messages. The chances are that if you upload a selfie in London, or post a status update in Paris, your data will be stored in Luleå, home to migrating reindeer and the northern lights. Pull up a 2008 photo and it will be conjured from a server here too, with data storage now a multi-billion dollar industry. According to Facebook, its Luleå warehouse is the most energy efficient computing facility ever built. It is cold in the Node Pole: winter averages -20C (-4F). Freezing air from outside is pumped into the building. It acts as a natural coolant, with hot air generated by the servers circulating out. Walls of axial fans keep temperatures constant. The location was also chosen for its electricity supply. A century ago, Swedenbegan building hydroelectric dams for its steel, iron ore and pulp and paper industries. These have declined - though Luleå's waterfront steel mill is still in business - leaving the northern region, Norrland, with a power surplus. Facebook's datacentre uses as much energy as the steel plant. According to Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, the company has done a heck of a good job with energy efficiency. The goal, he says, is to run its datacentres on 50% clean and renewable energy by 2018. What about funnelling heat into a swimming pool? Furlong said Facebook thought about the idea but decided it was uneconomic. The Luleå warehouse is vast, 300 metres wide by 100 metres long, and the size of four football fields, with three protruding square diesel generators, in the unlikely event the grid fails. Furlong said: "Architecturally, these are big buildings. They are not the Shard in London or Freedom Tower in New York, but as buildings put up for a purpose they are pretty darned good." Inside, the warehouse mixes Sweden with California. There is a six-sided snowflake with Facebook's logo in the middle; colourful paintings of reindeer hang in reception; a blue graffitied Facebook covers a large wall above a bank of screens. Clocks give the time at the other data hubs in North Carolina, Iowa and Oregon. Most of the 150 employees are locals, and a team of cleaners trundle constantly around the complex. Ville Sjögren, 28, the lead technician, says: "It's exciting here. We're at the front edge of technology. You get to see new stuff." Sjögren was repairing a broken server on row 28B, holding a new memory stick. The servers - housed in endless black racks - were made using the open compute project, an initiative where tech companies share the designs of their datacentre products.
Source: The Guardian See more at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/25/facebook-datacentre-lulea-sweden-node-pole
