Facebook is a social networking Web site and service where users can post

comments, share photographs and links to news or other interesting content

on the Web, play games, chat live, and even stream live video. As of June
2017, Facebook had 2 billion monthly active users and this number is
increasing at a rate of 17 percent per year. Two of its other apps, Facebook
Messenger and WhatsApp, have over 1.2 billion active users. All these users
require lots and lots of computing capacity to meet their data processing
needs and huge amounts of data storage to hold all their data, photos, and
videos. For example, just to load a user's home page can require pulling data
from hundreds of servers, processing tens of thousands of individual pieces of
data, and delivering the selected data in less than one second. With more
people going live and sharing video, Facebook must continually add new data
centers to keep up with the demand. Facebook spent $2.5 billion on data
centers, servers, network infrastructure, and office buildings in 2015. Facebook
already has existing data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North
Carolina, Lulea, Sweden; and Altoona, Iowa. Additional data centers are being
built or planned for Fort Worth, Texas; Clonee, Ireland; Los Lunas, New Mexico;
Papillon, Nebraska; New Albany, Ohio; Ashburn, Virginia, and Odense,
Denmark. These data centers are large football field-sized buildings each
housing tens of thousands of servers all networked together and to the
outside world. Building and outfitting each data center is a major project
typically lasting 12 months or more and costing over $500 million. A small
group of Facebook engineers spent two years designing and building
Facebook's first data center in Prineville including software, servers, racks,
power supplies, and cooling. When completed, the data center was 38 percent
more energy efficient to build and 24 percent less expensive to run than the
data centers Facebook rented from other organizations. Facebook uses
servers powered by chips from both Intel and AMD with custom designed
motherboards and chassis. It has also investigated energy efficient ARM-
powered servers. Facebook hardware engineers remove everything from the
servers that is not necessary for example no bezels, no paints, no extra
expansion slots, no mounting screws. The servers are mounted into a rack
which holds 90 servers in three columns. Cabling and power supplies are
moved to the front of the servers so Facebook technicians can work on the
equipment from the cold aisle, rather than the enclosed, 100 degree plus hot
backside of the server. The servers are outfitted with custom power supplies
that enable them to take power directly from the source eliminating the need
for step-down units as power passes through the UPS systems and power
distribution units. In the event of a power outage, the batteries keep the
servers running until the building's backup generators can kick on. In April
2011, Facebook, together with Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, and Andy
Bechtolsheim (billionaire co-founder of both Artista Networks and Sun
Microsystems), launched the Open Compute Project Foundation. The
Foundation is targeted at redesigning hardware to support the increasing
demands of users for more efficient, flexible, and scalable hardware and data
centers. This is made possible by the sharing of details of its energy efficient
data center design, as well as custom designs for servers, network switches,
power supplies, and UPS units. This approach marks a radical departure from
industry practice which typically regards such information as intellectual
property to be tightly protected. The Open Compute servers represent a
significant improvement in energy efficiency and a substantial reduction in
server cost.

A. INTRODUCTION
1. Identify the key problems and issues in the case study
2. Formulate and include a thesis statement, summarizing the outcome
of your analysis in one or two sentences

B. CONTEXT
3. Provide background information, relevant facts and the most
important issues.
4. Demonstrate that you have researched the problems in this case
study.

C. Alternatives
5. Outline possible alternatives (not necessarily all of them).
6. Explain why alternatives were rejected

D. Proposed Solution
7. Provide one specific and realistic solution
8. Explain why this solution was chosen
9. Support the solution with solid evidence
 Concepts from class (text readings, discussion, lectures)
 Outside Research

E. Recommendations
10. Determine and discuss specific strategies for implementing the
proposed solution
11. If applicable, recommend further action to resolve some of the issues