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."
Re:Privacy dashboard (Score:5, Insightful)
Deceptive metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
Re:Deceptive metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
And spending time on Slashdot is a good use of humankind's resources? What is the point of even being human if we can't have a little fun every once in a while?
Re:Deceptive metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Like you say, I might hate how Facebook does things, which is exactly what I'm doing here. New forms for fluid interpersonal communications via network channels? A-OK with me. Monetizing and commoditizing the "social network connectivity graph" to further entrench corporate power at the fundamental level of interpersonal interactions? DIAF.
What a strange world we live in... (Score:5, Insightful)
...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.