The Facebook Behemoth

The latest  NYT Magazine ran a great pieceon the enormity of data traveling through the internets and the physical space needed to accommodate it all.   This excerpt on Facebook really stuck out:

Facebook’s numbers are staggering. More than 200 million users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos, making Facebook the world’s largest photo-sharing service. This expansion has required a corresponding infrastructure push, with an energetic search for financing.

“We literally spend all our time figuring how to keep up with the growth,” Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations, told me in a company conference room in Palo Alto, Calif.

“We basically buy space and power.” Facebook, he says, is too large to rent space in a managed “co-location facility,” yet not large enough to build its own data centers. “Five years ago, Facebook was a couple of servers under Mark’s desk in his dorm room,” Heiliger explained, referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder.

“Then it moved to two sorts of hosting facilities; then it graduated to this next category, taking a data center from an R.E.I.T.” — real estate investment trust — “in the Bay Area and then basically continued to expand that. We now have a fleet of data centers.”

Think about that next time you need to post to your assorted “friends” the tedious minutiae of your daily lives.