Data Centers: Facebook Will Ice Backup Data in ‘Sub-Zero’ Building
Facebook will house its new breed of storage servers next to this Prineville, Ore. data center. Photo: Pete Erickson/Wired — We now know what Facebook is up to in Sub Zero — the mini data center it's building right beside …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sub-Zero is the next step in an arc Facebook has been running since it posted photos of the Prineville project in 2010 and then open-sourced its server and data center designs in 2011 under the Open Compute effort. The new mini building beside the Oregon facility applies that homegrown hardware playbook to a specific tier: a new breed of storage servers dedicated to backup data kept at low temperature, literally and figuratively.
The timing is not incidental. Facebook's July pass of Yahoo to become the second-largest U.S. online video site behind Google/YouTube means more bits to retain, and the company just closed out a three-year embarrassment in which 'deleted' photos lingered on its servers before deletion actually worked in August 2012. With its stock sliding after the IPO lockup released roughly 271 million shares, cheaper cold storage is a cost story as much as an engineering one.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a purpose-built facility that splits cold backup data off its primary Prineville compute floor, letting storage servers run without the power and cooling budget of live-traffic machines.
- The design lands inside the Open Compute framework Facebook established when it opened its server and data center specs in 2011, giving the community another reference build.
Second-order effects
- Rival hyperscale operators face pressure to match tiered hot/cold storage economics or keep paying full-price cooling on archival data — a cost gap that compounds as video uploads grow.
- Data center equipment vendors and colocation providers see another signal that the largest web companies will build bespoke facilities rather than buy generic capacity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscale campuses standardize on satellite buildings optimized per workload type — compute, warm storage, frozen backup — rather than one-size-fits-all halls, reshaping how sites are designed and how efficiency is measured.
- Purpose-built cold storage also prefigures the energy-intensity scrutiny the industry was heading into, since separating archival tiers is one of the few levers that cuts data center power draw without cutting service.
The trend: Hyperscale operators are moving from monolithic data centers to workload-specific buildings, with Facebook's Open Compute designs turning each tier — including sub-zero backup storage — into a shareable industry template.