Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour
(click image for larger view and for slideshow)Facebook grabs all the glory when it comes to efficient operations, but eBay is working hard behind the scenes to produce a data center that consumes less power but still sustains $68 billion a year in transactions. It's the first major data center in the U.S. to employ fuel cells as its primary power source. Data centers represent 2% of the electricity consumed in the U.S., a figure that is expected to go higher as a massive build-out occurs to provide cloud services, support more powerful websites and provide application services to millions of mobile phones. There's also a rivalry underway among major Web service providers to build the most efficient facility with the least environmental impact.
From a noxious gas point of view, the least polluting electricity production is hydro power. Amazon.com and Microsoft have built data centers in the Pacific Northwest that rely primarily on hydroelectric power. But not all data center builders have the option of locating there. eBay, now a mature Web services company, has introduced some new wrinkles in that competition.
EBay first established a more conventional unit in its
Topaz data center, which opened in May 2010 on a 60-acre site outside Salt Lake City. In its second phase, dubbed Project Quicksilver, eBay implemented fuel cells as an onsite power source to generate six megawatts of electricity. It used the public utility grid as its backup power source, which allowed eBay to do away with the uninterruptible power supply and backup generators that are a standard and expensive part of traditional data centers' design ...
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