Katie Fehrenbacher, GigaOm:
In a rare visit to Facebook’s Prineville data center on Thursday, the temperature hit a high of 93 degrees outside. While the cows we passed on the 20-minute drive from the Redmond, Ore. airport searched for any semblance of shade, Building No. 1 of the data center was as noisy as an industrial factory, with air flowing through the cooling rooms and the humidifier room spraying purified water onto the incoming air at a rapid rate. It’s like peeking inside a brand new Porsche while it’s being driven at its fullest capacity.
Pretty cool infrastructure photos. An interesting statistic in the article: Facebook has an estimated 180,000 servers - Google has over one million.