Why a Crisis in a Data Center Can be Considered a Gift
Facebook builds some of the most advanced, energy-efficient data centers in the world. Yet doing so at scale — enough to support billions of people — doesn’t come without challenges. One of these challenges brought James Swensen, head of global data center facility operations at Facebook, and I to 7×24 Exchange as co-presenters. In our presentation, we discussed an arc flash incident that took place in Facebook’s Lulea, Sweden location. The Lulea Data Center has a high amount of voltage in a comparably small square footage space and used a unique busway configuration to meet data center specifications . Such complexity means when there’s an incident, the cause is complicated as well. Typical questions asked after a failure in the data center are: What happened? Who was there? Why did it happen? That can turn into a finger pointing exercise, with any involved stakeholders hoping it’s not their work or equipment at fault. However, when collaborating on a solution to mitiga...