Facebook stocks data center with phones from yesteryear - CNET

Facebook has already saturated the richer countries, where consumers have the luxury of lining up for the latest gadgets and, more importantly, the cash, credit or subsidies to buy them.

Top-shelf phones typically cost about $700, which millions of people around the world are willing to pay. But for someone who makes about $5,000 a year, like the average Chinese worker, that's too pricey. A Galaxy Nexus, by contrast, can be had for $140 or less.

Facebook therefore needs to make sure its app works on those phones too. This need leads to the data center sitting 500 miles away from the company's Menlo Park, Califoia, headquarters. Facebook developers have been instructed to send their latest code to the data center to make sure it works well, no matter which phone it runs on.

Inside Facebook's massive Oregon datacenter

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Focusing on the future

Facebook already attracts more than a billion users every day, but its focus on the next billion can be traced back to initiatives like Inteet.org. Launched three years ago, Inteet.org was pitched as an effort to "bring affordable inteet access to everyone in the world."

"We believe that every person should have access to free basic inteet services -- tools for health, education, jobs and basic communication," Zuckerberg said on the initiative's first anniversary.

But as phones proliferated across the planet, Facebook realized its app -- one of the most used in the world -- didn't run as well on low-end phones. Sometimes updates to the app would perform even worse on older devices.

So last year, the company began a weekly tradition of slowing inteet speeds in its offices to simulate the slower inteet connections in emerging markets. "To build for a global audience like ours, we know that we need to design features that work seamlessly even on a 2G network," Facebook said at the time.

It also began testing its service on low-end devices, telling employees to ditch their beloved iPhones for low-end Androids instead. Engineers began testing various phones at their desks. Now, there are thousands of phones in Prineville, and more to be added in other data centers as well.

It's an odd way to use a data center, but Facebook isn't your typical company. Most of the technology in this 110,000-square-foot facility -- called Building 4 -- is designed to store, retrieve and transmit everything from cat videos to 360-degree photos of Wimbledon.

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Touring the center

When you type Facebook.com into a computer or tap on one of the company's apps on your phone, your device is connected with an intricately designed network filled with hundreds of thousands of servers sitting in large facilities like the one Facebook opened up to joualists on Tuesday in Prineville.

Think of it like the digital equivalent of a warehouse. The floors are gray, there's a hum of fans blowing and the walls are barren, save for the occasional exit sign or art project from a Prineville school.

Prineville was Facebook's first data center, opened in 2011. The company has since built five more in Sweden, Ireland, Iowa, Texas and North Carolina.

The facility doesn't rely on that much energy to power your "Happy Birthday!" posts either. Though Facebook wouldn't say how much the facility needs, it has about 84 megawatts worth of backup power on site. By comparison, the city of San Francisco peaked at 950 megawatts back in 2010.

It also only counts about 165 staff between employees and contractors. That's nearly one person for every 10,000 Facebook users logging in each month.

So what happens if Prineville suddenly goes offline? There's effectively several copies of all our data in the company's other centers. And to make sure it works, Facebook sometimes takes one of the data centers offline, without waing to staff.