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A Look Inside Facebook’s Data Center
If your users are uploading 40 million photos a day, what does your data center look like? A new video seeking to recuit engineers for Facebook provides a glimpse of one of the social network’s data center facilities, along with some facts about the social network’s amazing growth. The company’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Not surprisingly, the racks are packed. The facility is using a raised-floor design, with no containment but generous spacing between racks. Here’s the video, which runs about 2 minutes, 30 seconds.
For more about Facebook’s data centers, check out some of our previous coverage:
- Facebook Expanding Its Data Centers, Again
- Facebook Pushes Limits for memcached
- The Backstory: Facebook’s Virginia Data Center
- Facebook Now Running 10,000 Servers
If you’re interested in opportunities for engineers at Facebook, see their careers page.
About Rich Miller
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.
Stuff » Blog Archive » Facebook data requirements, daunting to say the least
Posted April 17th, 2009[...] Feed I came across this article and the sheer amount of data they deal with just in the terms of photos is amazing. They have the [...]
WOW. A million users per engineer. Simply amazing organization.
Damn! And we thought keeping up with delivering packages within an hour took a lot of co-ordination!
Johnny Mnemonic
Posted April 17th, 2009glimpse is right.
The video is much about the photo service than any information on how FB is storing that data.
Aye, looked like a recruiting commercial for Facebook. Not a word about the architecture.
Verbo.se » Nice Racks
Posted April 19th, 2009[...] density rocks. More here, with a touchy-feely FB recruitment [...]
My children have helped text msg’g hit a Trillion msgs this year and now they are contributing to the million photo’s from their cell phones. Cha Ching.
Facebook: un centro dati da 40 milioni di foto al giorno « Best Web News Blog
Posted April 20th, 2009[...] Via | Datacenterknowledge.com [...]
Inside Facebook | Faktory.dk
Posted April 20th, 2009[...] The people behind Facebook recently openede the doors to their serverfortress and revealed som inside-information for our pleasure. facebook servers The company’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Not surprisingly, the racks are packed. Links: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/17/a-look-inside-facebooks-data-center/ [...]
Interesting Reading… - The Blogs at HowStuffWorks
Posted April 22nd, 2009[...] A Look Inside Facebook’s Data Center – “If your users are uploading 40 million photos a day, what does your data center look like? “ [...]
onlyStuff.com
Posted April 23rd, 2009[...] data requirements, daunting… I came across this article and the sheer amount of data they deal with just in the terms of photos is amazing. They have the [...]
Facebook data requirements, daunting… • Blog Archive • onlyStuff.com
Posted May 8th, 2009[...] data requirements, daunting… I came across this article and the sheer amount of data they deal with just in the terms of photos is amazing. They have the [...]
Una mirada al datacenter de Facebook. | Ubicuos.com
Posted May 21st, 2009[...] DataCenter Knowledge Comparte esta información: [...]
Nathaniel
Posted May 21st, 2009I am the lead engineer for Dell at the east coast data center for facebook. All I can say is simply amazing what they are doing. Incredible the organization they have become!!
Marek
Posted June 24th, 2009Amazing stuff. One calculation puzzles me though. I don’t get the
2,000 photos/second = 40 million photos/day
There are 86,400 seconds in a day(24 hours). So,
40,000,000 / 86,400 = 463 photos per second. How did they get 2,000 photos per second?
That’s amazing. Look out Google!
Datacenter filmpjes / tours. - Pagina 4 - webhostingtalk.nl
Posted September 22nd, 2009[...] (er was ooit een linkje met hun video-channel ding maar daar lees ik overheen geloof ik) http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a…s-data-center/ en deze natuurlijk [...]
A Concerned Citizen
Posted October 18th, 2009Wow … so much hardware being utilized for so much banality and narcissism. I hope Facebook goes out of business VERY soon.
OMFG…..2000 photos per second…..
Amazing Facebook team.. I still learning and understanding about how datacenter work..
Facebook is Down: November 23, 2009
Posted November 23rd, 2009[...] has their own datacenters. According to Datacenter Knowledge, as of April this year the Facebook datacenter stores more than 40 Billion photos and users upload [...]
A Facebook (only) data center, it’s a reality – Tx Daily
Posted March 4th, 2010[...] was reading an article the other day about how Facebook has grown and how it dominates the picture hosting arena. The [...]
Inside Facebook’s Data Centre | TechHead.co.uk
Posted March 20th, 2010[...] an interesting posting over at ‘Data Centre Knowledge’ which discusses Facebook’s new recruitment video that [...]
Inside Ten of the World’s Largest Data Centers « Wikibon Blog
Posted March 25th, 2010[...] photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Via Data Center Knowledge, “Not surprisingly, the racks are [...]
A Facebook (only) data center, it's a reality – Techdaily
Posted May 10th, 2010[...] was reading an article the other day about how Facebook has grown and how it dominates the picture hosting arena. The [...]
Facebook hits 1/2 billion
Posted July 22nd, 2010[...] Minute Ago #7 tom.brown Registered User A Look Inside Facebook’s Data Center i think its this video – 1000 000 user per engineer – prertty awesome really [...]
The 1 Million Dollar Data Marketing Question | Randy's 1-2-3-4 Step Guide to Life in the 21st Century.
Posted July 23rd, 2010[...] the rate of information intake is growing unconscionably. Just look at facebook and this article A Look Inside Facebook’s Data Centers Facebook’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new [...]
Inside the Facebook data center | Exchange Server Pro
Posted July 25th, 2010[...] Click here to see the video. [...]
Facebook is simply amazing! At the rate it is growing per day, their data center is going to have to expand horizontally and vertically quick!
Worlds Largest Data Centers « cool SQL snips from SQLdigs
Posted August 31st, 2010[...] photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Via Data Center Knowledge, “Not surprisingly, the racks are [...]
The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook
Posted October 3rd, 2010[...] http://cns.ucsd.edu/lecturearchive09.shtml#Roth http://www.Facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/17/a-look-inside-Facebooks-data-center/ http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=T-Xr_PJdNmQ Share and [...]
Absolutely amazing. I could never image owning/running a website which required some many pc’s. I would love to know how FB uses virtualisation (if any)?
Nice video; wants me to go work for them; but what’s up with that Belgian national flag hanging on it’s side behind Josh ? Some Belgians working there perhaps, which would make me proud since i’m one too ?
Inside Ten of the World’s Largest Data Centers « Bắt đầu mới
Posted April 12th, 2011[...] photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second. Via Data Center Knowledge, “Not surprisingly, the racks are [...]
Paul C.Lalchungnunga
Posted June 6th, 2011Very Interesting Indeeed
Didn’t some non profit say facebook’s data center was not very economically friendly? Something about using coal power instead of renewable energy. Oh well, kudos to facebook for having a data center that could keep up with so many clients, I know co-ordinating packages for our courier service is tough, their database must be huge, hopefully its not prone to hdd failure.
A Facebook (only) data center, it’s a reality | Techdaily
Posted September 29th, 2011[...] was reading an article the other day about how Facebook has grown and how it dominates the picture hosting arena. The [...]
Gian
Posted March 7th, 2012Does anyone knows what company Facebook uses for data storage? Now going public must be a very interesting stock to watch…. any idea?
Wow, Facebook certainly know how to do data centres!
We coudl all learn something from them.
Chris chalme
Posted May 17th, 2013Who is the data manager at Facebook ?
RESOURCE LINKS:
Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI
How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center
Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local
Microsoft’s $1 Billion Data Center
April 17th, 2009