Last year Facebook built a 62,000 square foot data center on its Prineville campus to house its cold storage, which can house 500 racks that each hold 2 petabytes of data, for a total of 1 exabyte of cold storage. Similar facilities will be built at Facebook’s data center campuses in North Carolina and Sweden, Parikh said.
The cold storage data center has no generators or uninterruptible power supply (UPS), with all redundancy handled at the software level. It also will use evaporative cooling systems, although on a smaller scale than the two-story free cooling system employed in the adjacent production data centers in Prineville, which use the entire second floor as a cooling plenum.