I know this has to be the age old question since the dawn of time – “How many servers does it take to run Facebook” I mean seriously how does a single site with more than 400,000,000 users maintain the massive amounts of information it generates each day? How many servers does Facebook have? For some time now, the stock answer has been “more than 10,000 servers,” a number the company began using in April 2008. Facebook has continued to use that number, even as it has soared past 300 million users and dramatically expanded its data center space.

We now have an update: Facebook has 30,000 servers supporting its operations. That number comes from Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, who discussed the company’s infrastructure in a presentation last week at UC San Diego

“Today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” Rothschild said during the Q&A session following his talk, adding that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis.

x’s 30,000 =

20,000 Servers In 18 Months
It also suggests that Facebook has added about 20,000 servers since early 2008, which explains why it borrowed 100 Million dollars in May 2008 to fund server purchases.

100 MILLION DOLLARS!!!! Why you could buy yourself a Asian hooker every night of the week for the next 30 years

25 Terabytes of Log Data – Daily
The amount of log data amassed in Facebook’s operations is staggering. Rothschild said Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data, which he said was the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

• In standard SI usage, 1 terabyte (TB) equals 1000000000000bytes = 1000⁴ or 10¹² bytes.
• Using the traditional binary interpretation, a terabyte would be 1099511627776bytes = 1024⁴ = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1 tebibyte (TiB).

And for a even more indepth view of what a Terabyte is:

That’s a lot of bytes….

Lets say this.. Your standard 3.5″ Disk holds 1.44 megabytes of information.

It would take approximately 711 3.5″ disks to make a Gigabyte

Meaning it would take 728,064 3.5″ Floppy disks to make a Terabyte

Now Facebook uses 25 Terabytes PER DAY..

So that equals to 18,201,600 3.5″ Floppy Disks of information per day

Floppy Disk Terabyte Car

With all them Disks you could own yourself one of these bueaties!

Now you may ask yourself one more question why you ride around in you FLOPPY DISK car filled with Asian Hookers..

Facebook costs more to run than you think

WHAT DOES IT COST TO RUN FACEBOOK:

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly – we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake – earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

There is a brighter note to all this.. Ever imagined WORKING FOR FACEBOOK? Well let me tell you this, Disney World ain’t got Sh*t on Facebook!

So in closing all I can say is this..  Mark Zuckerberg YOU ARE MY HERO! I only wish I could of thought it up before you.

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