Facebook looking to improve data centre efficiency

Web hosting users looking to adopt a greener approach to their operations could look to Facebook for inspiration. The social networking company has just announced it is planning to cut energy loss in its servers from 35 to 15 per cent.

Facebook engineer Amir Michael, talking at an event in Palo Alto in California, spoke of removing the organisation’s data centres’ uninterruptible power supplies as well as power distribution units.

There are other ways for companies to cut their PUE (power usage effectiveness), as James Cole, director of data centre designers Keysource has pointed out.

He said that firms can use cooling technologies which take fresh air and bring it into the data centre. Organisations can also utilise the ambient outside air temperature to achieve better cooling, Mr Cole explained.

Mr Cole did have a warning for companies also: "To read too much into PUE could make it easy to be perversely led by driving down this specific metric number, and not understand the bigger picture."

Written by Murray Francis.