Facebook Builds Data Center Near Arctic Circle
Facebook will be constructing a gigantic datacenter in Lulea, Sweden.
The city is located near the Arctic Circle and will be home to Facebook's first European data center. Lulea's sub-arctic climate will enable the company to take advantage of natural cooling resources with a climate that has short, mild summers and long, cold winters.
The data center will have a floor space of more than 900,000 square feet, which exceeds the size of 15 football fields. According to the town of Lulea, the facility will be built in three phases and eventually consist of three separate server rooms that are designed to handle a substantial portion of Facebook's data traffic. The completion date is targeted for 2014.
Facebook has been frequently criticized, especially by Greenpeace, that it does not make enough effort to achieve an efficient use of energy in its data centers and draw most of its power from coal power plants. The Lulea data center will consume power that is exclusively produced by water power plants and the natural climate should help bring down the power consumption quite a bit. Competitors, such as Google, use similar concepts: Google recently opened a data center in Hamina, Finland, which uses sea water for cooling its servers.
Having 100+ ping on farmville isn't that critical
Having 100+ ping on farmville isn't that critical
only if it could protect users from privacy leaks and malware better.
apple called, they patented the arctic circle datacenter idea.
rofl
"Facebook will be constructing a gigantic datacenter in Lulea, Sweden, to store the private information that you have deleted"
never watched it predators, but do you mean the thing?
that said
didnt Greenpeace get hijacked by anti corperate people and loose its origional meaning...
that also said, why not just build more nuclear power plants, take all of americas power cost down significantly, and make everyone but the most stupid of hippy happy.
I too am surprised Greenpeace and others aren't upset about this. You would think it would increase melting rates. Should help with their electric bill however.
And Facebook will bring down the some countries and continents under water...
The bad, The Swedish government give 100 Million SEK , aprox €10-9 million to facebook for this. Could have been used elsewhere.
To those thinking that it will accelerate the melting rate. Luleå does not intersect the north pole i.e. there is no ice caps around Luleå, it is far far away. So no melting of the ice caps, only snow.
Latency: Dont be shitting me, Sweden have one of the best infrastructure when it comes to fiber optics and copper.
Avalanches on flat ground? That's a new one.
It doesn't matter what infrastructure there is in Sweden, when we're talking about a trip from Europe to USA. The Transatlantic latency alone is ~80ms.
If you're in the US it would most likely use a datacenter in the US. And it's not like 80ms is alot ^^.
Never, it would violate several international treaties.
It wouldn't increase melting rates unless they build it right inside a glacier.
not necessarily true...by that time latency will be a thing of the past....they will make it work