Facebook Letting Everyone See How Much Data-Center Power It Consumes 86
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has added real-time dashboards for measuring the efficiency of its data centers' internal power and water use. Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here), measuring both the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness of those facilities, in addition to the ambient temperature and humidity. So far, visitors to the Prineville and Forest City dashboards only see a limited snapshot of the Facebook data: the display only covers 24 hours, and is delayed by 2.5 hours on both sites. Facebook also hasn't disclosed how many servers the data represents, which could conceivably be used by competitors to get a sense of the social network's total computing power. The company said that once its data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, Facebook will begin adding data from that location, as well. Although Facebook said it provided the information out of a sense of openness, the data—showing PUEs of about 1.09 for both facilities as of press time—is a bit of a boast, as well; as recently as 2011, Uptime Institute said that the average data center's PUE was approximately 1.8. So far, Facebook hasn't said whether it will provide access to the dashboards via an API, so third parties can get a better sense of how Facebook is managing power and water use over time, and through various seasons of the year."
Doesn't show power consumption (Score:4, Informative)
This doesn't show power consumption. It only shows ratios that are considered a sort of measure of efficiency.
It's like showing "miles per gallon" instead of "gallons used". In the case of facebook, they may be driving at 40 MPG, but they drive a million miles a day and that's a lot of fuel!