I’m a sucker for huge numbers, and Facebook’s engineering team has shared a pretty interesting data point: Facebook users have now uploaded more than
10 billion photos [1]. More than 300,000 images are served every second.
Facebook’s 10 billion images easily outdistances the largest photo-sharing sites. Photobucket hosts about 6.2 billion photos, while Flickr has 2 billion, according to
CNet [2].
So Facebook users upload a ton of photos. What’s the significance? Those photos have to live somewhere. Facebook now has more than 1 petabyte of photo storage, and at least 2 terabytes of photos are uploaded every day. That will drive demand for
more servers [3] and more
data center space [4].
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/2008/10/15/facebook-hosts-10-billion-photos/
URLs in this post:
[1] 10 billion photos: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=30695603919
[2] CNet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10066650-36.html
[3] more servers: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/05/12/facebook-borrows-100-million-to-buy-servers/
[4] data center space: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/02/05/facebook-scales-up-its-data-center-space/
[5] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
Click here to print.
