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Facebook Testing Lithium-Ion Batteries For Backup Power

Posted by timothy on from the economies-of-web-scale dept.

itwbennett writes Facebook has just started testing lithium-ion batteries as the backup power source for its server racks and plans to roll them out widely next year. Lithium-ion has been too expensive until now, says Matt Corddry, Facebook's director of hardware engineering, but its use in electric cars has changed the economics. It's now more cost effective than the bulky, lead-acid batteries widely used in data centers today.

1 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Li-Ion batteries aren't good for this role by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It presumably depends on how your UPS capacity is distributed, as well.

    Lead acid is damned heavy, and offers mediocre density; but if you are just going to shove them in the basement, or are building on the cheapest flat land in the middle of nowhere that you can find, that may not be a problem. However, if cabling costs or resistive losses make 'distributed' UPSes, with fewer big battery banks and more, smaller, battery packs powering individual systems (presumably also cutting DC/AC inverter losses out of the equation and providing DC directly to the motherboard) the superior density and lighter weight of Li-ion is much more attractive.