Inside Facebook's Infrastructure

miller60 writes "Facebook served up 690 billion page views to its 540 million users in August, according to data from Google's DoubleClick. How does it manage that massive amount of traffic? Data Center Knowledge has put together a guide to the infrastructure powering Facebook, with details on the size and location of its data centers, its use of open source software, and its dispute with Greenpeace over energy sourcing for its newest server farm. There are also links to technical presentations by Facebook staff, including a 2009 technical presentation on memcached by CEO Mark Zuckerberg."

Comments

Call me dense, but...

[mlts]

Call me dense, but with all the racks of 1U x86 equipment FB uses, wouldn't they be far better served by machines built from the ground up to handle the TPM and I/O needs?

Instead of trying to get so many x86 machines working, why not go with upper end Oracle or IBM hardware like a pSeries 795 or even zSeries hardware? FB's needs are exactly what mainframes are built to accomplish (random database access, high I/O levels) and do the task 24/7/365 with five 9s uptime.

To boot, the latest EMC, Oracle and IBM product lines are good at energy saving. The EMC SANs will automatically move data and spin down drives not in use to save power. The CPUs on the top of the line equipment not just power down what parts are not in use, but wise use of LPARs or LDoms would also help with energy costs just due to having fewer machines.

Re:Call me dense, but...

[njko]

The purpose of server farms with comodity hardware is just to avoid vendor lock-in, if you have a good business but you are tied to a vendor the Vendor has a better business than you. they can charge you whatever they want.