Facebook Data Centre Strategist Logging Out

Jonathan Heiliger, the architect of Facebook’s data centre strategy and its move to greener operations, is leaving the company at the end of summer.

He has been vice president of technical operations with the company for four years and joined when the company had under 100 million users. During his tenure he has managed the rapid growth which now has to accommodate up to 700 million active users per month.

He also campaigned for chip manufacturers to develop processors more suited to sustainable data centre operations and helped to bring Facebook’s uptime to 99.88 percent this year.

Greenfield Site In Oregon

On April 15, the next phase of growth was marked with the opening of the Prineville Building 43 data centre in Oregon. At the opening, Heiliger claimed that the centre was operating at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.07. He added that his aim was to emphasise the “negawatt” – a saved megawatt.

“That’s the watt you never see and never use. We think that’s the most effective way for operators of large data centres to conserve energy,” he said.

Electrical savings at the centre will save the equivalent of 51 tons of fossil fuel and cut Facebook’s utility bills by over £5,500 a year.

The company has just released a video tour of the new facility:

Future Plans Away From Startups

Heiliger is not leaving for a new job and said he is taking a break. He will continue to work with social networking startups like Jive Software and Webmonsters but said he needs a break from the frenzy of the startup life. Ultimately, he will return to his roots as an entrepreneur.

Facebook said in a statement. “Jonathan will be missed, but his departure is made a little easier thanks to the strong, talented team put in place over the years. We suspect Jonathan’s energy and experience will be put towards making the web more scalable and more social so our loss is a net gain for the technology community.”

He will be replaced by one of the current team, Jay Parikh, who was a recent hire from the social networking site-creation company Ning.

Heiliger will continue to play a part in the Open Compute initiative that he helped to start. This is a discussion forum for sustainable data centre specifications and technologies where green issues can be argued over and recommendations developed.

Before joining Facebook, Heiliger was an executive at other startups LoudCloud, Danger and Bubble Motion, as well as technical advisor for venture firms Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Index Ventures.