Inside A Facebook Server Farm

I may not agree with Time’s choice for Person of the Year (or their second choice), but I can still respect a good datacenter. These pictures from Time are worth a gander, though the IT-minded among you will likely be frustrated at the lack of juicy details like storage codecs, protocols, server models, and so on… but you can still admire the pretty cabling.

Check out the whole gallery here. I like to imagine the sound of the place. A steady hum if all is well, a few beeps here and there as backups and rarely-used databases come online, and the occasional step of an IT professional, walking among his servers like a shepherd in his flock.

[header image credit: Martin Schoeller for Time]