Facebook has broken ground on a data centre in Clonee, Co Meath, the company’s sixth in the world. The $200 million project begins after local residents’ appeal against the granting of planning permission for the social media giant last June was rejected.
The data centre will create 2,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs and will be equipped with servers and storage from the Open Compute Project, a Facebook initiative that shares designs as open source with other data centre operators to standardise and drive down the costs of equipment.
“We will outfit this data centre with the latest OCP server and storage hardware, including Yosemite for compute,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh said in a post on the social networking website. Yosemite is an open source modular chassis for high-powered microservers, designed by Facebook.
The social networking company already has another European data centre in Lulea in Sweden, which takes advantage of the icy cold temperatures there to cut the energy required to cool the data centre.The Clonee centre will run entirely on renewable energy by taking advantage of the abundant supply of wind in the location, Parikh wrote. “This will help us reach our goal of powering 50% of our infrastructure with clean and renewable energy by the end of 2018,” he added.
Ireland has been Facebook’s international headquarters since 2009, and the new Clonee centre “will continue Facebook’s significant investment in the country and in Europe,” wrote Tom Furlong, Facebook’s vice president for infrastructure.
Having a data centre in Ireland will also help Facebook meet any local demands that consumer data should stay within Europe. In October, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the ‘safe harbour’ agreement that governs personal data transfers between the US and the European Union is invalid.
IDG News Service
Ltd
