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Facebook Letting Everyone See How Much Data-Center Power It Consumes
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has added real-time dashboards for measuring the efficiency of its data centers' internal power and water use. Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here), measuring both the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness of those facilities, in addition to the ambient temperature and humidity. So far, visitors to the Prineville and Forest City dashboards only see a limited snapshot of the Facebook data: the display only covers 24 hours, and is delayed by 2.5 hours on both sites. Facebook also hasn't disclosed how many servers the data represents, which could conceivably be used by competitors to get a sense of the social network's total computing power. The company said that once its data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, Facebook will begin adding data from that location, as well. Although Facebook said it provided the information out of a sense of openness, the data—showing PUEs of about 1.09 for both facilities as of press time—is a bit of a boast, as well; as recently as 2011, Uptime Institute said that the average data center's PUE was approximately 1.8. So far, Facebook hasn't said whether it will provide access to the dashboards via an API, so third parties can get a better sense of how Facebook is managing power and water use over time, and through various seasons of the year."
Makes perfect sense they don't wanna disclose the number of servers. They like their privacy
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- what data nuggets have been collected about me over the past 24 hours, week, month
- what third party entities my data has been shared with
I am sure that this community can suggest other items that would be useful on a Facebook Privacy Dashboard.
In the background, I cannot shake the thought that Facebook is putting up this energy consumption dashboard for the purpose to divert attention away from Facebook's ongoing privacy issues.
Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
The amount of data center power consumed would sure be an interesting statistic, but it isn't anywhere in the link. The only two metrics listed other than the publicly available weather are PUE = [Total Building Load (kWh)] / [IT Load (kWh)] and WUE = [Volume of water required to condition data hall air (liters)] / [IT load (kWh)].
The dashboard is not actually in real-time, but carries a 2.5 hour delay.
...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Delete your account, stop worrying, and get some sleep.
Its off topic (but a more interesting topic) Although having read about it you have to *delete* the account which allegedly will remove it, but deactivate your account and messages you sent, may still be visible to others. they also save your timeline information (ex: friends, photos, interests, etc.)
But even then you have companies like http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence like this one who mine data...and create links. Not sure how you delete their data, or even find out who has it.
Deleting you account is the tip of the iceberg...an illusion of privacy at best.
I cant imagine giving a fuck how much power facebook uses...
I take an extremely accepting view of what might qualify as "news for nerds," but this absolutely fails the "stuff that matters" test. Honestly, who the hell cares about this? It's a cheap stunt, and nothing more.
Write failed: Broken pipe
I, for one, was up ALL NIGHT worrying about how much power they were consuming, and how efficient they were. I was just getting ready to write my congressman about it. Facebook really anticipated my concern here! it's like they read my mind, or my email!
Uh oh.
...and, if I were you, I would expect English lessons.
How much extra power is this going to use?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here)
Why add a separate word "here" just for the link? That part could have been written like:
Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. and Forest City, N.C. data centers
Much neater.
This doesn't show power consumption. It only shows ratios that are considered a sort of measure of efficiency.
It's like showing "miles per gallon" instead of "gallons used". In the case of facebook, they may be driving at 40 MPG, but they drive a million miles a day and that's a lot of fuel!
Bah! Just the power consumption of some uninteresting company, here is the real time power consumption of an entire country.
I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.
On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.
Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.
Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?
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[In the middle of writing this post, my SO wanted me to "unfriend" some supreme PoS. No visible way to do this. Search Google. Go to this Facebook help page, appropriately called "How do I unfriend or remove a friend?". In attempting to follow the 3 simple steps, I go to that person's Facebook page and attempt to hover over their FRIENDS button. Of course they are not showing one. Back to Google. Follow this new link...interesting how Facebook says it is a 3 step process (that doesn't work, and requires *#&%^ Javascript) and the wikihow page says it is an 8-step process that involves finding the person on _your_ FRIENDS list. Not easy to find the FRIENDS list, even on your own page. Turns out it is under "Edit your profile". Bring up my SO's list of friends. Un-frigging-sorted! Can you believe that?! Captain A-hole is not there. Walk away furious...]
Last word from me on the subject, for today: Facebook needs to shrivel up and die.
I come here for the love
Facebook also has (or had, as of May 2012) a large presence in a datacenter owned by BAIS, located at the border of Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, called "SC2". It's a fantastic datacenter, to be honest: I used to rent 24U of rack of space (secured cage, not shared rack) + bandwidth (3.0mbit 95th-percentile) + power for about US$750/month, plus insurance costs (around US$500/year). Most of the expense was the physical rack space.
Let me be clear: the datacenter is amazing, is engineered Mostly Right(tm), and is very large (83,000 square feet) when compared to their previous DC (called "SC1", which consisted of the classic chicken-wire-esque fencing model, crappy AC (floor blowers were brought in but couldn't solve the situation) and tons upon tons of customers who did crap like this. Those idiot customers were "siphoned out" as a result of the SC2 migration (given new requirements/etc.) and I was honestly glad to see those customers go. There were a few in SC2 who continued to operate like this (devices/wiring literally being crammed into a secure cage, to the point where it blocked 90% of airflow), but no where near the number as in SC1).
At a networking level the services offered were done "mostly" right (there were a couple router or switch failures during the years I was there, where redundancy kicking in required manual intervention -- Tom Wye (CEO) would always respond personally in Email about such incidents, which was positive), though I imagine Facebook's network was separate from the BAIS network. My point is that the DC as a whole was done really, really well.
So when I say "large presence", what do I mean? Quite literally: half the datacenter (41,500 sqft) was just for Facebook, and that half was cordoned off (extra set of fencing and separate badge readers) too.
How did I know it's Facebook? Because there were multiple (not a couple, but 5 or 6) gigantic Facebook banners/stickers/labels all over the equipment, visible from behind the fencing, and because I ran into other customers who seemed to know that fact (conversations implied they knew people who worked at Facebook, who recommended BAIS, and that's why they themselves were getting rack space there).
The downside to Facebook owning half the DC is that BAIS stopped caring as much about smaller customers, since half their revenue was coming from Facebook. This manifested itself negatively in a couple of different ways, which I can itemize if people are interested in knowing. The short version is that very selective rules were applied to only the "smaller" customers, while the big boy a thousand feet away wasn't given the same degree of scrutiny, including being allowed to violate "hazardous material" requirements for several months (possibly indefinitely).
I have no idea what Facebook does at SC2, but given its size, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. No, it's not a full-fledged ground-up facility like the one at Prineville or Google's The Dalles datacenter, but it's worth pointing out that it's a good size and still located in Silicon Valley.
Facebook just made confortable our life.
alarmas