Facebook gets a do-over

Well, not really, but Facebook is building their second datacenter, a $450 million dollar investment in the economy of North Carolina. One can only imagine that Greenpeace is primed to go into action if the facility doesn't use power that is environmentally friendly at all steps in the process and produces no side effects beyond rainbows and butterflies.

Facebook is building the facility with the target of obtaining LEEDS Gold certification, so they will be heavily invested in efficiency and utilizing the LEED guidelines for the construction of new facilities that meet the definitions of green. Utilization of environmental cooling, rather than traditional chillers, high-efficiency power utilization, multiple type of energy sourcing will all go a long way to making the new datacenter a green poster child.

The facility is expected to be completed by the end of Q2 2011, and will go a long way to meeting the needs of the Facebook community, especially if there is massive acceptance of the new Facebook RockMelt browser with it's feed-driven features that will have the Facebook datacenter continually pumping out information to, and about , their millions of users. A rich, multimedia browser experience, if RockMelt is successful, will place a huge demand on the Facebook backend, and the new datacenter is being built with the need to service that demand in mind.

That's not to say that Facebook will find themselves saddled down with unnecessary capacity if RockMelt isn't the success they expect. But the capacity will be there to meet the potential on-demand needs of Facebook and their users.