Facebook Borrows $100 Million to Buy Servers
Facebook has arranged new financing to buy $100 million worth of servers, according to Business Week, which says the social networking site struck a "venture lending" deal with TriplePoint Capital, a Menlo Park (Calif.)-based company that specializes in lending money to startups. The $100 million "will be used entirely for servers," Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu told BW.
It's been clear that Facebook will be a major customer of server vendors since it leased an entire data center building in Santa Clara, California, positioning the company for significant additional growth. As we reported in February, the lease for 86,000 square feet of brand new raised-floor server space from Digital Realty Trust (DLR) puts some large dollar signs on the importance of social networks as users of data center space.
You can fit a lot of servers into an 86,000 square foot data center. We recently noted that Facebook now has at least 10,000 web servers, and $100 million will buy a boatload more. Who's the likely beneficiary of that server spending?
Posted by Rich Miller 
May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 23, 2008
Facebook Now Running 10,000 Web Servers
How big is Facebook's Internet infrastructure? Facebook VP of Technology Jeff Rothschild provided some details in a panel at the recent MySQL user conference. Rothschild says Facebook is now running 10,000 servers, including 1,800 MySQL servers that are overseen by just two database administrators.
That server growth is one reason Facebook has expanded its infrastructure through major leases of new data center space from DuPont Fabros (DFT) in Ashburn, Virginia and Digital Realty Trust (DLR) in Santa Clara, Calif. That's also why IBM is introducing new iDataPlex servers optimized for Web 2.0 and cloud computing apps later today at the Web 2.0 Conference. IBM has clearly taken note of the success of Rackable (RACK) in large server sales to Facebook, Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft and Yahoo.
Posted by Rich Miller April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
February 26, 2008
MySpace Bests Facebook on Uptime
MySpace has had better uptime than Facebook thus far in 2008, as MySpace has been offline for just 25 minutes, compared to 1 hour and 35 minutes for Facebook. But Yahoo!360 and LiveJournal have them both beat, according to a rating of uptime on social networks that has just been published by Pingdom. The monitoring found at least one instance in which a sopcial network's effort to transition to an application platform may be affecting performance:
Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks we monitored for this survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.LinkedIn, which is widely used among business professionals, has had 4 hours of downtime in 2008. How does your favorite network fare? Check out the results of Pingdom's research.
Posted by Rich Miller February 26, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
February 05, 2008
Facebook Scales Up its Data Center Space
Facebook will lease an entire data center building in Santa Clara, California, positioning the company for significant additional growth. The lease for 86,000 square feet of brand new raised-floor server space puts some large dollar signs on the importance of social networks as users of data center space.
Facebook is leading the charge, armed with piles of cash from a $240 million investment by Microsoft. Since lining up the Microsoft funding, Facebook has leased data center space in Virginia and now a much larger facility in Santa Clara. The company is set to invest $200 million in capital expenditures this year, and data center providers and server vendors will be prime beneficiaries.
As is often the case with large data center deals, the principals aren't confirming the details of the Santa Clara lease, but there appears to be little doubt that the tenant is Facebook. Digital Realty Trust (DLR) said last month that it had leased the custom-built facility to "a leading Web 2.0 social networking company," but wouldn't identify the tenant. Facebook was also strategically vague. "I can't comment on specific data center locations," said Jonathan Heiliger, VP of technical operations for Facebook. "However, I can tell you we work closely with Digital Realty Trust as one of our infrastructure providers."
Posted by Rich Miller February 05, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
December 23, 2007
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."
Posted by Rich Miller December 23, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 30, 2007
Facebook Effect? Rackable Server Sales Soar
Rackable Systems (RACK) says it posted the fastest one-year sales volume growth among leading sellers of x86 servers in North America, according to industry analyst firm Gartner. Rackable's sales increased 23 percent from the third quarter of 2006, according to Gartner's quarterly review of server sales. That outpaced the broader industry growth rate of 8.7 percent, as well as the sales performances by HP (+20.2%), Fujitsu (+17.4%), Dell (+5.4%), IBM (-3.9%) and Sun Microsystems (-4.5%).
What's behind the numbers? Rackable has always sold lots of equipment to Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), who are both busy building data centers. But in the past year it saw significant sales from two newer customers: Facebook and Amazon (AMZN). Facebook has been buying servers and adding data center space to keep pace with its huge growth, while Amazon continues to build out the infrastructure for its utility computing services, S3 and EC2.
Posted by Rich Miller November 30, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
October 29, 2007
Facebook Growth Boosts Results at Rackable
Sales of its high-density servers and racks to huge customers have been the bread and butter for Rackable (RACK), as Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) have historically accounted for about 60 percent of the company's sales. Last quarter analysts noted that sales to Amazon (AMZN) were helping Rackable's results, as the retailer buys hardware to support its utility computing platform.
In the latest quarterly earnings call, Rackable said it has added a fourth large customer, as Facebook is now among its top accounts. That relationship positions Rackable to benefit as Facebook beefs up its infrastructure in coming months. Facebook recently leased additional data center space from DuPont Fabros, and has cash to invest in the wake of fresh investment from Microsoft and venture capital firms. Facebook had 30.6 million visitors in September, according to data from comScore.
Posted by Rich Miller October 29, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
October 18, 2007
Facebook Expands Data Center Space
Facebook has leased space in a state-of-the-art data center in Ashburn, Virginia to power the huge growth of its social networking service. The addition of 10,000 square feet of space in a new facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) will allow Facebook to expand its server infrastructure. The lease is for the second phase of a $375 million facility, 300,000 square foot facility that is scheduled to come online Nov. 1. It is not known when Facebook will begin moving equipment into the facility, known as ACC4.
The lease, which was signed on Oct. 15, was reported in an SEC filing in which the tenant was not named. DuPont Fabros executives identified Facebook as the tenant in a presentation to investors in advance of its IPO.
The 10,000 square foot lease is not enormous by data center standards. But Facebook has positioned itself for substantial growth, as the second phase of the ACC4 facility is currently 56 percent leased, with more than 37,000 square feet of raised floor space available. This gives Facebook the option of leasing additional space in the facility as its Internet infrastructure grows. Yahoo (YHOO) and MySpace are among the other tenants in ACC4.
Posted by Rich Miller October 18, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
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