Facebook to build massive server farm near Arctic Circle

Facebook will be building a massive server farm just 62 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Luleå, northern Sweden. The facility will include three 300,000 square feet server halls, according to the Washington Post.

This will be the first time that Facebook has built a data center outside of the US, which has become a trend for large American companies as of late. In 2007, Microsoft looked to build a server farm in Siberia but the deal was never finalized. Google is currently building a similar data center in Hamima in southern Finland.

Key to Facebook choosing Luleå is the cold climate. A large server farm requires massive amounts of cold air to keep operating temperatures down. The average temperature in the area is around 2C (35.6F) and the temperature has not been above 30C (86F) for more than 24 hours since 1961. The plan is to pump in cool air from outside to aid in temperature management.

Despite the ability to use natural cool air, the server farm will still require a lot of power; 120 MW to be exact. This will primarily be supplied by the Lule River which produces twice as much hydroelectric power as the Hoover Dam. The reliability of the local power grid didn’t hurt matters, either.

Facebook Director of Site Operations Tom Furlong is overseeing the project and was responsible for selecting the site among more than 40 other locations. Facebook users in Europe and surrounding areas should expect a performance boost once the new data center goes online in 2014.

IBM to build the biggest data drive ever capacity of 120 petabyte

IBM is in the process of building the largest data repository ever constructed, with a combined storage capacity of 120 petabytes. The facility is being developed at the company’s Almaden, California research center.

Technology Review reports that IBM is building the record-breaking storage system for an unnamed client that needs a supercomputer capable of real-world phenomena simulation, such as those used to model weather and climate.

120 petabytes is an enormous amount of storage. To break things down, 1024 gigabytes equal one terabyte. 1024 terabytes equal one petabyte. If I’ve done the math correctly, 120 petabytes is equivalent to 124 million gigabytes.

To put that into perspective, the system could store 24 billion five megabyte MP3 files. Furthermore, about 60 backup copies of the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine could be stored, with each copy containing 150 billion web pages. In total, the system is expected to hold roughly 1 trillion files.

IBM will use 200,000 conventional hard drives to create the data container, which will be about 10 times larger than any previous effort. With so many disks in the array, it’s inevitable that drives will fail, perhaps on a semi-regular basis. IBM is preparing for such a scenario by storing multiple copies of data on different disks as well as employing new methods to keep the supercomputer running at almost full speed should multiple drives expire. According to director of storage research and project leader Bruce Hillsberg, the system should not lose any data for a million years.

Download Windows 8 Pre-Beta Build Logon Screen Background

We have already discussed about the new logon screen (welcome screen) in Windows 8. The all new logon screen now displays date, time, and day of the week. Although the current logon background picture is not great, you might want to download it.

Users who have used the Release Candidate and above version of Windows 7 might know that the same background picture is available in Windows 7 as well. But if you want to download the logon background for your XP or Vista, you can now download it from the below mentioned link.