Facebook is a social networking Web site and service where users can post comments, share photographs and links to news or other interesting content on the Web, play games, chat live, and even stream live video. As of June 2017, Facebook had 2 billion monthly active users and this number is increasing at a rate of 17 percent per year. Two of its other apps, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, have over 1.2 billion active users. 

All these users require lots and lots of computing capacity to meet their data processing needs and huge amounts of data storage to hold all their data, photos, and videos. For example, just to load a user’s home page can require pulling data from hundreds of servers, processing tens of thousands of individual pieces of data, and delivering the selected data in less than one second. With more people going live and sharing video, Facebook must continually add new data centers to keep up with the demand. Facebook spent $2.5 billion on data centers, servers, network infrastructure, and office buildings in 2015. 

Facebook already has existing data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina, Lulea, Sweden; and Altoona, Iowa. Additional data centers are being built or planned for Fort Worth, Texas; Clonee, Ireland; Los Lunas, New Mexico; Papillon, Nebraska; New Albany, Ohio; Ashburn, Virginia, and Odense, Denmark. These data centers are large football field-sized buildings each housing tens of thousands of servers all networked together and to the outside world. Building and outfitting each data center is a major project typically lasting 12 months or more and costing over $500 million. 

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Identify three good reasons why a Tier 2 data center would not meet Facebook’s needs. 

2. Your organization has decided to outsource its data center operations. You are responsible for performing an initial assessment of service organizations that wish to compete for this business. Develop a set of six questions you can use to determine if an organization’s data center is a 1, 2, 3, or 4 data center. 

3. Based on business needs, should the data center at your place of work (or university) be designed and operating as a tier 1, 2, 3, or 4 data center? Explain why.