Facebook Estimated to Be Running 180,900 Servers

[Guest]

How many servers does it take to run Facebook? A new estimate puts the company's server base at roughly 180,000 units.

Facebook Estimated to Be Running 180,900 Servers : Read more

 

[Guest]

they need store users images/albums somewhere...

 

[snowzsan]

LOL well they probably wouldn't need so many if people reviewed their pictures before uploading them to facebook for relevancy/quality/content. Instead you see one user has about 300 albums listed "~!~-~-SUMMER 2010!! -~-~!~" with 300 pictures in it where only 30 are of any importance or even visually descriptive.

Honestly, it's a mess.

 

[Tab54o]

and 180,899 are dedicated to farmville

 

[tupz]

Facebook, in its IPO filing, said it stores over 100 petabytes (PB) of media (photos and videos). It’s not unrealistic to say that Facebook probably has a total storage of capacity well beyond that, once you factor in backups and other data (status updates, likes, and so on), possibly in the 300PB range.

Nuts! -- via

 

[Antimatter79]

In 5 years, the picture above will be updated to show one lonely server on a rack in Zuckerberg's basement.

 

[crisan_tiberiu]

so, where is the "green part" while using Facebook and Google, huh??????

 

[psikaikai]

180,900 servers full of shit

 

[Guest]

seriously, what a waste of electric power

 

[whimseh]

Whaa?? It's 2012, we should only have to use 1 server for this.

 

[cookoy]

and how many would tom's hw have?

 

[therabiddeer]

I highly doubt 180,900 is an accurate number. I cant really say anything about specifics, but if that were the case then they hugely over-invested into servers or about 179,000 of those are cheap servers. Also, none of the ones that I was involved in used a 300w PSU, but those were storage servers.

 

[leongrado]

I wouldn't be surprised if some of my friends could fill a whole server with all the crap they're posting on Facebook.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]snowzsan[/nom]LOL well they probably wouldn't need so many if people reviewed their pictures before uploading them to facebook for relevancy/quality/content. Instead you see one user has about 300 albums listed "~!~-~-SUMMER 2010!! -~-~!~" with 300 pictures in it where only 30 are of any importance or even visually descriptive.Honestly, it's a mess.[/citation]

One person I know has like 700 pictures in total...

 

[shin0bi272]

Who knew people whining about what they did today and hooking up with old flames and making duckface pictures took that many servers to operate on... but I guess 900 million users take up some space. With facebook's ipo an utter disaster and their current price under 20 bucks (initial offering at 38) one has to wonder how long they will stay public or in business. I mean lets be honest here... their business is selling your information that you post on there... and they made BILLIONS doing it. Yet people just keep queuing up to play zynga games and pay real money for phantom pigs and then we wonder why Americans are so lazy.

 

[digiex]

In my opinion, the servers are gold mine in terms of personal information.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]john_4[/nom]The FEDS know this too and why do you think in your face Facebook is being pushed on us so hard.[/citation]

And don't forget the Homeland Security, and the CIA. There's been some speculation that the CIA had a role in funding Facebook.

 

[TheKurrgan]

wow.. ok well the number provided includes QUITE a few things other than servers.
Lets break it down..
Cooling. At least 33% of that quoted data center figure is probably cooling.
Switching is at least 3%
So there goes 36% of the power, if directly translated from the server count of 180,900, it leaves us with
121,203. Fairly significant reduction. And some of that has to be storage only devices, which SHOULD account for a lions share of the power consumption. However, this would depend greatly on the methodology used in creating the data center, as there are many ways to do it that would require more or less storage only devices. If, for some reason -- They decided to take the approach of purely distributed, most redundant, most expensive solution and use no SAN, and rely on direct attached storage per server, minimizing the loss of data per failure point (which is likely mirrored at this point), given the amount of users, and the, in the words of Chef from south park "Ridiculous load of pig crap", each user brings with them, I could easily see the total server count for FB being 121K using the methodology described above. If they use any SAN, it should be significantly reduced.

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]cookoy[/nom]and how many would tom's hw have?[/citation]
Guessing wildly here, but I'll take a stab at it. Text heavy articles aren't going to require multiple servers to store. I'm guessing tom's gets a fairly large amount of traffic, so we're going to need to load balance things, which is going to require a few redundant servers and some extra ones to do the balancing. Finally, you're going to want to put servers in the country they're serving to improve response times.

So, by SWAG, I'd say 4-6 servers per localization (probably several more on the US and UK sites, fewer on smaller ones like Turkey), or a few dozen total.

 

[STravis]

[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom] pay real money for phantom pigs and then we wonder why Americans are so lazy.[/citation]

Did you mean lazy or stupid?

 

[razor512]

the problem with services like facebook, they will eventually fail when they stop growing. their business model requires unlimited growth or it fails because the current user base is constantly adding content which makes hosting more expensive. Once they reach a point where they stop growing or start shrinking then they will go down hill insanely fast.

 

[spartanmk2]

180,900 too many.