Facebook Letting Everyone See How Much Data-Center Power It Consumes

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."

Privacy dashboard

[QuietLagoon]

... I'd rather Facebook put up a dashboard that shows how much they have been violating my privacy. I'd like to see a Facebook dashboard that is customized for me that shows, among other things:

.
- what data nuggets have been collected about me over the past 24 hours, week, month

- what third party entities my data has been shared with

I am sure that this community can suggest other items that would be useful on a Facebook Privacy Dashboard.

In the background, I cannot shake the thought that Facebook is putting up this energy consumption dashboard for the purpose to divert attention away from Facebook's ongoing privacy issues.

Re:Deceptive metrics

[spire3661]

We havent even begun to understand the positive or negative effects of the communication level Facebook allows. Like it or not, it s a HUGE hive of human activity engaging more people then any other service before. It represents hopes and fears and dreams and thoughts and loves and hates. You might hate how Facebook does things, but the actual events occurring inside are meaningful and useful to the human race.

Re:Will deleting change anything?

[lister king of smeg]

if you change you age to under 12 facebook nukes you account from orbit or so i am given to understand.