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    Facebook's North Carolina data center goes live

    Facebook's North Carolina data center goes live

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    Facebook's new data center in Forest City, North Carolina has become operational today, with features that it claims make it one of the greenest designs in the world.

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    Your statuses, photos, pokes, and likes might now now be served up from North Carolina, as Facebook's data center in Forest City is now online. It's taken 16 months since construction began to get to this stage, with more than 2,000 people putting in an average of 600 hours each to get the server farms up and running. This is Facebook's second US data center, joining its other facility in Prineville, Oregon, and aims to be as green as possible, with a unique air cooling system designed by the OpenCompute project that uses the ambient atmospheric temperature to cool the servers.

    How green this actually turns out to be might be up for question. Greenpeace has repeatedly criticized data centers for their use of electricity generated through coal-powered stations, and there's also been suggestions that the solar arrays used by Facebook in its Prineville data center and Apple in its Maiden, North Carolina plant might be better for PR purposes than the environment. However, with Facebook planning to expand its Prineville site with a sister facility, its use of North Carolina's cheap power is only bound to increase.