Facebook suffered from cloud in Oregon data center

From the British edition of The Register became known , perhaps the funniest IT news of the year before last. In the Facebook data center, like an art installation by Bernd Smild , a real, not digital, vapor cloud formed, which dropped out of rain, as a result of which the company's server crashed.

Representatives of the largest social networking service in the world referred to this misunderstanding as a “moisture incident” within the premises of the first data center in Prineville. Jay Parih, vice president of infrastructure, in an interview for The Register on Thursday, called the incident much simpler: in the summer of 2011, Facebook had two clouds, a digital one, which was the core of the site, and a steam one, which watered the first condensate.
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“They called me:“ Jay, there’s a cloud in the data center. ” “In the sense, outside?” “No, inside”. ” There was a panic, in the data center was a real rain. This happened because of the used air conditioning system without a cooler, machines of this type, for the sake of ensuring high rates of energy saving, are installed by Internet giants of the “Google” and “Facebook” levels.

In the summer of the first year of operation in Prinville data center, due to an error in the building management system, there was a problem of high temperature and low humidity from the server racks. The air circulated endlessly through a water-evaporative cooling system that tried to cool it. As a result, at the entrance to the server racks, the air was so humid that condensate began to fall on the electronic equipment.

Apparently, in order not to scare the shareholders, a rather dry language was observed in the official press:

This led to the fact that the temperature of the air supplied to the server racks exceeded 80 ° F [27 ° C], and the relative humidity exceeded 95%. The Open Compute servers that worked in this data center responded to these changes. Many machines were restarted, and several were automatically shut down due to a power supply failure.

Some servers are completely out of order because a short circuit has occurred in their power supplies. For several minutes in the data center, you could hear the clapping and hissing of Facebook servers.

The lesson was learned from the error, and now the power units are hermetically sealed, and the humidity control and management system has been improved. There were no more similar incidents involving condensate and clouds in Facebook data centers. Now the data centers of the blue social network are the most energy-efficient in the industry, sometimes even surpassing the clouds of Google.