A CLOSER LO
FACEBOOK, PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA,
Many companies look at innovation as an endeavor that’s both expensive and risky. Not Facebook. For the global social network- ing site, it’s standard operating procedure. “Being innovative is just a natural part of
how we do business,” says David Gardner, PMP,
group technical program manager at the com-
pany. “Innovation is so second nature to how we
do things, we almost take it for granted.”
Working on the bleeding edge carries a cer-
tain risk, of course. But in the constantly evolving
world of social media, Mr. Gardner and his team
have little choice but to find ways to deliver proj-
ects faster and more efficiently.
“Our customer base constantly wants more,
and we are always fending off competition,” he
says. “Speed is critical.”
This need for speed was especially para-
mount on a multimillion-dollar project to move
1 terabyte—that’s 1 trillion bytes—of data from
the company’s near-capacity data center to a
new warehouse.
And it all had to happen without even the
slightest disruption of the site experience for
Facebook users and the revenue-generating
internal work groups that rely on the network.
“Moving such a massive data store to a new
physical location was risky,” says Doug Tai, the
program manager in charge of the project. “The
potential for hardware failure, transition failures
or network outages was all a concern.”
HEAVY LOAD
The project was conceived in September 2009
and had to be completed by the end of Decem-
ber. Phase one involved building and outfitting
David Gardner, PMP,
Facebook
