Congratulations to LinkedIn’s Hillsboro, Oregon, Data Center

Rick Gonedes
August 8, 2017

At Raritan, we believe that when data centers and their operators take significant steps to improve their energy efficiency, it's a cause for celebration because it not only helps the entire industry, it also helps planet earth. We would like to extend a heartfelt congratulation to the LinkedIn team on their newest data center located in beautiful Hillsboro, Oregon. The data center was built with a goal of significant energy savings and was deservingly awarded the coveted “Uptime Institute Efficient IT Stamp of Approval.”

LinkedIn's Newest Data Center: What You Need to Know

LinkedIn currently has a worldwide customer base of more than 450 million users, meaning that about two people sign up for the site for the first time every second. As a social network catering exclusively to business professionals, it has an important role to play and obviously, its data centers are extremely important.

LinkedIn has taken great strides to reinvent the data center in design and execution with an effort to deliver a profound level of flexibility and scalability to its operations. LinkedIn's newest data center received the Uptime Institute Efficient IT Stamp of Approval in a large part for its energy efficiency design. The company applied highly innovative approaches and advanced technologies, allowing them to increase their compute capabilities per square foot while being more efficient with electricity and other resources at the exact same time.

Part of this is due to the fact that LinkedIn employs Raritan's high-voltage intelligent rack PDUs, which comes complete with advanced features like outlet-level metering. Thanks to the fact that the data center's operators have accurate, actionable, and real-time information on power capacity, they're in the best possible position to make the right decisions at the right times.

With Raritan's high-voltage PDUs and other devices, LinkedIn was able to double up on servers per cabinet, making maximum use of the physical space. They have also been able to prevent downtime caused by over-subscription of power circuits and uncovered new advanced ways to save energy across their entire facility and so much more.

LinkedIn's Hillsboro, Oregon data center is hosted by Infomart, and in addition to being built with an unparalleled level of energy efficiency in mind, it also happens to be the most technologically advanced data center in the company's global portfolio. The new sustainable mechanical and electrical system that made its debut in Oregon will now be the benchmark for every data center the company constructs moving forward.

In the end, LinkedIn's newest data center should act as an important lesson. Data centers as a concept aren't going away anytime soon, but the way they're built and the purposes that they're designed to fulfill are constantly evolving as the Internet does the same. It is possible to "have your cake and eat it, too" - particularly in this sense. Energy efficient operations and flexible data centers are not mutually exclusive concepts. With the right equipment and a little bit of forward thinking, it is absolutely possible to achieve both at the same time.

To learn how LinkedIn’s Oregon data center uses Raritan’s intelligent PDUs to extend higher-voltage power distribution directly to cabinets to achieve scale, savings and uptime, view our webinar “How LinkedIn Scaled Data Center Operations with Three-Phase Power.”