Facebook begins the construction of Data Center in Prineville, Oregon.

Written by Ifeyinka

On Friday, January 22, 2010, Facebook, the social network giant, laid the foundation block for its own data center in Prineville, Oregon.  There are over 350 million users on Facebook who has their information stored with the online social network. Data Center is a server and data storage infrastructure that used to house computer systems and associated components. Data Center is also called server farm.

Facebook’s Oregon data center would be 147,000-square-foot, and it is projected to cost $188.2 million. The construction of the custom data center is expected to be completed in 2011.

The decision of Facebook’s management to construct its own data center is an applaudable cost saving strategy. This is because the economic scale of owning and managing data center favors the fastest expanding online social network at this time because of its ever growth membership subscriptions. Facebook had leased server space from wholesale data center providers Virginia and California. The construction of the data center is vital at this point in time when Facebook is setting the stage to go for Initial Public Stock Offering (IPO) by hiring David Ebersman last year. David Ebersman was the former CFO of Genentech.

The establishment of Facebook’s data center in the city would be the largest investment in Prineville, Oregon in the last three decades.  The construction of the data center is expected stimulate the local economy of the city of Prineville which has been severely affected by the economic recession; the citation of the data center in the county seat of Crook County would create over 200 jobs during the construction and thousands of jobs after when the Data Center commence its operations in 2011.

Oregon State is a good location for Facebook because the state offers tax incentives for companies, favorable weather conditions (cold), efficiency and affordable power supply. Facebook is not the first Information Technology related company to strategically locate its data center in Oregon; Amazon and Google have their data centers in Oregon even though these companies’ headquarters were located in other states.

Facebook’s Prineville data center facilities would be equipped with energy efficiency appliances and technology such as evaporative cooling system, airside economizer, re-use of server heat and proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology:

Facebook’s company profile

Founder:                   Mark Zuckerberg

Founded:                  February 1, 2004

Location:                  Palo Alto, California, U.S.

Data Center:             Prineville, Oregon, U.S.

Funding:                   $716M

Users’ Population:    350 million

Acquisitions:             Parakey  and FriendFeed.   

Investments:             Wildfire Interactive and LuckyCal.