It was raining in the data center.” In Prineville’s first summer of operation, the combination of high temperatures, low humidity, and a water-based cooling system led to the condensation of evaporated water in the aisles among the servers, creating indoor clouds.Ī data center is a computational landscape that undergirds our frictionless technology-driven contemporary life. “What do you mean-outside?” Parikh asked. “Jay, there’s a cloud in the data center,” the caller said. In June 2013, Jay Parikh, the head of Facebook’s infrastructure and operations team, received a call about the company’s new data center in Prineville, Oregon.
“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remains unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, we the tiny, fragile human body.”
