Social media conglomerate Facebook on streamlining its hyperscale datacentre buildouts

At the time of this decision, the company had four datacentre regions close to design completion, and two regional expansions that had just been finished, he recalled.

“The decision was to pivot for each of these and all projects moving forward,” he said. “That meant a complete specification rewrite, the development of all new PLC-based standards, building a PLC delivery model while also gaining buy-in and acceptance from all of our downstream partners. We also had to prepare our internal teams to manage completely new or different workflows.”

One of the first things Schneider Electric did after securing the Facebook contract was create a cross-functional team, populated with experts from the worlds of building management and industrial systems, recalled Bill Westbrock, the company’s global strategy account executive.

“We started out building a cross functional team that draws from Schneider Electric experts from not only the building management side which focuses on the HVAC categories, but also on the industrial automation side to make sure we were capturing the PLC industrial automation part of it, blending those things together,” he said.

On the Facebook side, a new delivery model for its datacentre projects was also embarked on to ensure each contractor would be accountable and take ownership for the particular deliverable they were responsible for.

“It was a model that none of our partners had ever experienced, and it came with some significant growing pains, but [as a project owner] we knew the only way to get what we really wanted was to make this ourselves,” said Ronan.

“As such, we created a delivery structure with direct owner oversight of the development and delivery project of all the hardware designing programming elements associated with BMS. At the project level, the general contractors hired independent system integrators to install and commission each individual site.”

To give attendees an insight into how the shift in strategy had accelerated the pace of Facebook’s datacentre buildout plans, Ronan explained how the firm had one datacentre at 50 megawatts of capacity by 2011.

By 2018, however, the company had 18 server farms online with 450 megawatts of capacity. “By the end of 2022, we expect to have about 68 datacentres, serving traffic across the world,” he said.

And in terms of how much traffic that amounts to, he said – across Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – the firm’s datacentres hosted more than 100 billion messages every day by the end of 2020. To accommodate all these interactions and messages, the datacentres Facebook builds are decidedly supersize. “Not only are these datacentres just extremely large but they [exist] across a 200-acre campus, [and that] campus has multiple data halls on it, as well as high-voltage utility substation,” said Schneider Electric’s Westbrock.

“There’s a renewable energy system and dozens of standby generation for the backup requirements, and then – of course – once you get inside, just endless rows and rows of IT rack and infrastructure,” he said. “So much that you need scooters and bikes to get around inside the data hall and to go from building to building on the campus. [They] truly are a remarkable design and accomplishment by Facebook.”

Given the sheer size of the Facebook’s datacentre footprint, its senior leadership team are continually looking for ways to streamline the buildout process even further, with optimising its processes being a key focus for the firm throughout 2020.

“You always have to take a look at what’s working and what’s not and make course corrections, and 2020 became our year of optimisation,” said Ronan. “We’d made it through our original build schedule, but we needed greater organisational alignment, and efficient execution. 

“At the end of 2019 we put an aggressive 2020 roadmap in place, working with [our] leadership team. We reorganised internal team structures for broader alignment [because] we needed to lead our commercial execution processes and create much more repeatable workflows.”