Updated: Facebook these days is doing everything in its power to imitate Google, recruiting the search giant’s sales people, poaching its senior executives and — most importantly — using infrastructure as a competitive advantage. Like Google, Facebook has figured out that the right web infrastructure is the difference between user delight and dismay. And like Google, Facebook is finding out that it isn’t cheap.
I’ve been trying to get a handle on Facebook’s infrastructure for some time, but so far have been unable to get the company to open up. The last time I reached out to them, back in January, I was hearing that they had between 1,200 and 1,500 servers, along with storage and switches from EMC Corp. and Force 10 Networks respectively. As it turns out, those server numbers weren’t even close to the total servers used by them.
The company is running around 10,000 servers, according to Data Center Knowledge, citing comments made by Facebook VP of technology, Jeff Rothschild, at a recent MySQL user conference. (See video of the panel.) Of the 10,000 servers, 1,800 are from MySQL and around 805 of them are memcached servers. In order to house its sprawling infrastructure, Facebook has leased data center space from DuPont Fabros in Ashburn, Va., and Digital Realty Trust in Santa Clara, Calif., DCK reports.
How much is Facebook spending on its infrastructure? The company isn’t going to tell us, but there are clues. Server and storage company Rackable today reported first-quarter 2008 sales of around $69 million. Facebook is one of its largest customers, accounting for around 10 percent of Rackable’s sales (that number could be higher, but we’ll have to wait for Rackable’s 10-Q to get a clearer picture), so some quick, back-of-the-envelope math reveals $7 million in spending by the social networking company. A well placed source of mine just let me know that Facebook is going to spend over $9 million more on servers this year. That should be good news for Rackable. Next on my list is an estimate of Facebook’s bandwidth and data center costs.
The hardware spending by startups like Facebook will be a topic of discussion at our Structure 08 conference, where we are hoping to learn more about the infrastructure secrets of all of today’s top (and fast-growing) web players.
33 comments so far
11:59 AM PT
Isn’t Google employing strategy of 100 cheap used hardware instead of 1 costly powerful server? It would be interesting to confirm because its working for Google and maybe facebook should go that route. (Although its a different story that Google loads up those cheap machines with its own version of linux and file system for better performance).
12:14 PM PT
That strategy only works when power and space is cheap and processing power is expensive. We’re starting to see that shift in a major way. Big iron is making a comeback in power effecient packaging.
12:21 PM PT
Re server hardware choices, Facebook is a big customer of Rackable, apparently their forth-largest after Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Nov/30/facebook_effect_rackable_server_sales_soar.html
1:33 PM PT
“between 1,200 and 1,500 servers from EMC Corp. and Force 10 Networks.”
EMC makes storage systems and Force 10 makes Gigabit Ethernet switches…not really “servers” in my opinion. Was this sentence supposed to read differently?
1:55 PM PT
how does this compare with myspace? ha
1:56 PM PT
@ GaryO
You were right - few words got dropped. I fixed the sentence. Thanks for looking out
1:57 PM PT
@ Rich Miller
I also updated on Facebook’s likely spending for rest of the year on the post: about $9 million.
2:21 PM PT
and that’s just on servers.
2:50 PM PT
I can tell you, accessing Facebook from Europe is always a real pain, loading so slowly.
4:32 PM PT
Zuckerberg estimated $200M in 2008:
http://webcommunityforum.com/2008/02/zuckerberg-says-facebook-will-hire-650-people-and-spend-200-million-this-year/
2:57 AM PT
Klaus: I usually find Facebook and most big US sites fine; sadly, though, I’ve often found US/Canadian transit providers with little or no global transit bandwidth: technically, they provide “transit”, but with shockingly high latency by very inefficient routes. I have a server colocated in California on the end of a Peer1 connection - which routes UK traffic via Amsterdam, of all places, resulting in atrocious performance! (The really stupid thing is that IIRC they and the UK ISPs I was testing from have direct connections into LINX, which should give far better performance than the detour via the Netherlands. Maybe they’re trying to meet a traffic quota at AMSIX?)
3:13 AM PT
[...] Source here… This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 11:45 pm and is filed under le Chat Marchet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
3:23 AM PT
[...] was zahlt wohl Facebook für die Infrastruktur? Om Malik ist den Kosten auf der Spur (die Sprache ist von 10.000 Servern, davon 1.800 MySQL Server und 800 [...]
3:28 AM PT
Does someone know how is FaceBook going to make a dollar?
4:23 AM PT
That’s a hell of a lot of power going to waste. Think of the planet!
Talking of the planet, all the Facebook staff should drive Hummers.
4:33 AM PT
[...] and around 805 of them are memcached servers. In order to house its sprawling infrastructure, Fread more | digg [...]
5:07 AM PT
[...] Facebook?s Insatiable Hunger for Hardware [...]
7:04 AM PT
[...] is kept and delivered in the fastest amount of time. For proof that storage is relevant check out Facebook’s hardware. A little more than 8% of their servers are devoted to the distributed caching system, memcache. [...]
3:59 PM PT
I hope that I can come up with a simple business concept such as facebook and make it worth as much. Is facebook really worth its crazy current valuation of multi billions, even though there is plenty of valid reason for them being worthless.
9:22 PM PT
I have never been happy with Facebook’s latencies and load times, no matter where I access from, although I have noticed some modest improvements to date. It may be that Facebook’s questionable utility to serious businesses, coupled with it’s weak ability to monetize, will be a serious drag on its growth heading into the weakening economy.
Also, all of this heavy iron and the investment thereof, might just be one boat anchor of a liability (sucking up cash that might be put to better use). There are many more creative strategies for building capacity.
9:27 PM PT
It’s much better to run larger servers rather than smaller servers. This is because, I can bet, synchronizing memcached between 805 servers is much more difficult than synchronizing between let’s say 200 servers, of 4x the power. Also Apache and other web-servers can scale very well on high powered machines. Running Apache across many servers will require more code to run, and will cause much more heating, and consume more space.
Mukul.
12:19 AM PT
10,000 servers is ridiculous. For crying out loud, you can build a nice quad-quad core server with 64gb of RAM for $10k. With 20 of those I can power Facebook easily. That is 1.2 TB of RAM or shit, buy a 100 of those and you got 6 TB of RAM and 1600 processors. If you cannot power Facebook with that, then you don’t know how to architect for shit. Can’t do it with 100 servers? Ok, buy 1000 of them and you got 60 TB of RAM and 16000 processors. If you cannot power with that, then you are probably mentally retarded.
7:20 AM PT
[...] world’s hunger for server capacity? At first, when I read Steven Baker’s write-up on Facebook’s server farm–10,000 servers and counting–I was amazed. Why the heck does Facebook need that many [...]
7:35 AM PT
[...] Facebook’s Insatiable Hunger for Hardware 10,000 servers, 1,800 are MySQL and around 805 of them are memcached servers (tags: facebook) [...]
9:19 AM PT
strange, why to copy Google if Google strategy has been targeted on US success and times has changed - US is less and less leader (if at all, make yourself search for “food rationing”, yes, first time in US history)… do they have capability to think by own brain at FB at all?
11:53 AM PT
@A.T.
Please expand on your ideas about why the US not being a leader in any way invalidates following Google’s proven success? I’m just wondering what other examples of mega-success you’ve come across on the Internet that has somehow escaped the attention of the rest of the Internet.
2:26 AM PT
What about the number of SysAdmins? Do you have any figures on this by any chance? Would be interesting to find out…
2:41 AM PT
The original article mentions 2 DB Admin for 1,800 MySQL servers…. Ouch…. Don’t know how leggit this info is, but if it is actually the case, it is damn impressive!
4:04 AM PT
[...] read more | digg story [...]
5:25 PM PT
Facebook is doing it’s best to scale up and those hardships are going to be a hard juggle. I think they started off with their feet facing the wrong direction.
9:16 PM PT
[...] Malik, Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 9:16 PM PT Comments (0) Last month, I wrote about Facebook’s insatiable hunger for hardware. Over the weekend, Spencer Ante of Business Week [...]
12:23 PM PT
[...] of servers per month (this is getting more and more coverage of late, esp when you consider Facebook seems to run on only 10,000 servers [...]
10:13 AM PT
[...] 08Archives Geek Out: How Facebook Scales Chat — Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans [...]
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