Facebook: We Maxed Out Our Data Centers
Facebook has officially announced that it has opened a data center in Virginia 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:
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."
If you enjoyed this post subscribe to our RSS feed
By Rich Miller 
December 23, 2007 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail
RELATED ENTRIES
Facebook Scales Up its Data Center Space -
Feb 05, 2008
Facebook Effect? Rackable Server Sales Soar -
Nov 30, 2007
Facebook Growth Boosts Results at Rackable -
Oct 29, 2007
Comments
As you point out and quote, Facebook is a rapidly growing site and hence has rapidly expanding infrastructure needs. In addition to the Virginia facility, we are in the process of expanding data center space on the West Coast. Like many of your readers, we are constantly focused on building capacity and improving our user experience.
I thought this was an important comment to make as your headline infers we’ve exhausted our data center capacity. This is a great blog, thanks for taking the time to dig up interesting stories and aggregate news on the data center infrastructure industry.
Posted by: Jonathan Heiliger at December 26, 2007 05:33 PM