Data Center Knowledge

Facebook: We Maxed Out Our Data Centers

Posted By Rich Miller On December 23, 2007 @ 7:58 pm In Facebook | Comments Disabled

Facebook has officially announced that it has opened a data center in Virginia [1] to expand its infrastructure, and adds some details on the company’s growth and how it will synch profile data between its facilities. Facebook has leased 10,000 square feet of space in a new Ashburn, Va. facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT).

Facebook engineer Jason Sobel said the service has been adding nearly two million users per week, and “the load on our thousands of servers continues to increase at a pretty astounding rate.” Here’s an excerpt from Jason’s blog item [2]:
A few weeks ago we reached full capacity in our California datacenters. In the past we handled this problem by purchasing a few dozen servers, hooking them up, and getting on with our lives, but this time we didn’t have it so easy. We’d actually run out of space in our datacenters for new machines. Fortunately we saw this problem coming a long time ago and started work on a new datacenter in Virginia.

Sobel also calls the Ashburn facility a “great first step” and hints that there’s additional data center expansion ahead: “Going forward we have lots of exciting plans to expand our infrastructure and improve performance so no user ever has to sit around waiting for a page to load.”

About Rich Miller [3]

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com

URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/23/facebook-we-maxed-out-our-data-centers/

URLs in this post:

[1] data center in Virginia: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Oct/18/facebook_expands_data_center_space.html

[2] Jason’s blog item: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7899307130

[3] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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