[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Facebook’s new data center in Forest City, North Carolina, is online and serving live user traffic, says the social network. In the 16 months since Facebook broke ground on the facility, more than 1.2 million hours from nearly 2,000 people, have gone in to make the data center go live.

Forest City is the first major deployment of the v2 OpenCompute Project Web servers, which are in turn are some of the first to use Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor in production. The Facebook Forest City data center has a projected power utilization effectiveness (PuE) measurement for the entire facility of 1.06 to 1.08. It will also be the first live test of the Open Compute Project’s outdoor-air cooling designs in an environment where temperature and humidity conditions are considered to be outside the range of typical data center operations.

Facebook is also working on a second building on the site that mirrors the first, and are on track to complete it in 2012.

[Image Courtesy: Facebook]