Facebook 'stress-tests' new data center

Social network Facebook has been stress-testing its new company-owned data center.

The firm's new center is located in Prineville, Oregon, and replaces the two leased facilities the company held in Northern California and Virginia.

It has been designed and built from scratch for Facebook but the construction of the center is only the first part of the challenge.

Now, a blog post from the network explained, it has had to stress-test its entire software infrastructure to ensure its data storage systems are up to the job.

To do this, Facebook commandeered a giant cluster of production servers on the other side of the US to check the the "entire software stack would be able to evolve and work smoothly in the new region, without interrupting what our users do every day on Facebook".

Employee Sanjeev Kumar added in the company's engineering blog: "The solution was to stimulate a third region of data centers, even before the new servers in Prineville came online.

"We called this effort and the simulated region 'Project Triforce'."