Data Center Knowledge

Facebook Now Hosts 220 Billion Photos

Posted By Rich Miller On December 14, 2012 @ 9:49 am In Facebook | No Comments

Facebook’s data centers house more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. User photo uploads have reached 300 million per day. (Photo: Rich Miller)

It’s well established that Facebook now has more than 1 billion active monthly users. But what does that translate into in terms of the demands on its infrastructure?

At an Intel briefing earlier this week, Facebook VP of Hardware Design Frank Frankovsky attached some large numbers that illustrate the company’s infrastructure challenge. Facebook now hosts 220 billion photos, Frankovsky said, with another 300 million photos being uploaded every single day. How many more photos have been uploaded while you’ve been reading this? The 300 million uploads a day work out to more than 208,000 photo uploads every minute of the day.

Facebook’s data centers now store more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. “That is a fantastic amount of information,” says Facebook VP of site operations Tom Furlong in this video from “How Do They Do It?”, which is one of the better video tours we’ve seen. It includes rarely-seen shots of the racks of servers rolling into the Prineville data center, and also provides a look at how the Facebook team keeps all those servers running.

For a closer look at the technology inside Facebook’s data centers, see these DCK videos:

Also check out our Facebook Channel [8] for more stories.

About Rich Miller [9]

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/2012/12/14/facebook-now-hosts-220-billion-photos/

URLs in this post:

[1] Facebook’s Next-Generation Servers & Storage: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/12/03/video-facebooks-next-generation-servers/

[2] The Evolutions of Facebook’s Cooling System: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/12/04/evolution-of-facebooks-cooling/

[3] Facebook’s Storage Design Prototype: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/27/video-facebook-storage/

[4] Facebook’s Open Rack Revealed: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/27/video-facebook-open-rack-demonstrated/

[5] Facebook’s New Server Design: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/27/video-facebook-compute-unit/

[6] Inside Facebook’s Server Room: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/18/video-inside-facebooks-server-room/

[7] Facebook’s Penthouse Cooling System: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video-facebooks-penthouse-cooling-system/

[8] Facebook Channel: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/category/companies/facebook/

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

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