Facebook Engineer Doug Beaver has announced that the social networking site now hosts 10 Billion photos & Facebook has just over one petabyte of photo storage. Since Facebook stores 4 sizes for each stored picture, this actually translates to 40 Billion files, of those 33.2 billion were added within the last 17 months. Doug also reports that over 300,000 images are served per second.
If Facebook were a nation, it would be the world’s 12th most populous & there would be very little doubt about whether it is sustainable as a business. But “Is Facebook sustainable ecologically”?
Some quick maths:Earlier GigaOm reported Facebook to have around 10,000 servers & last May Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million to purchase another 50,000 servers.
Going by Doug’s number -in order to support those 300,000 images, Facebook requires 10,000 servers as well as the 300,000 users PCs. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Add in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, at any point of time, overall Facebook power consumption equals:
(10,000 x 250 ) + (300,000 x 120) = 38,500 Kw or 51,629 HP
That’s an awesome number of horses !!
Hence on an estimated ballpark - Facebook daily consumes 924,000 KiloWatt-Hours with per capita of 3.08 KWh . Annually the per capita figure would be 1124 KWh /year or equivalent to emission of 0.75 ton of green house CO2 (Carbon footprint) which is half of NY city’s carbon footprint. Sadly with Facebook adding more ‘horses’ (50K more servers) to cater to our photo addiction - this number would increase to 1 ton of CO2 .
Please Consider Environment Before Uploading Your Photos On Facebook
‘Green computing‘ remains a buzz word in 2008 & subsequent years. However the BIG question is with plethora of options for Green Web Hosting available - shouldn’t Facebook, the most successful contemporary social network, consider one?
If Facebook were a nation, it would be the world’s 12th most populous & there would be very little doubt about whether it is sustainable as a business. But “Is Facebook sustainable ecologically”?
Some quick maths:Earlier GigaOm reported Facebook to have around 10,000 servers & last May Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million to purchase another 50,000 servers.
Going by Doug’s number -in order to support those 300,000 images, Facebook requires 10,000 servers as well as the 300,000 users PCs. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Add in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, at any point of time, overall Facebook power consumption equals:
(10,000 x 250 ) + (300,000 x 120) = 38,500 Kw or 51,629 HP
That’s an awesome number of horses !!
Hence on an estimated ballpark - Facebook daily consumes 924,000 KiloWatt-Hours with per capita of 3.08 KWh . Annually the per capita figure would be 1124 KWh /year or equivalent to emission of 0.75 ton of green house CO2 (Carbon footprint) which is half of NY city’s carbon footprint. Sadly with Facebook adding more ‘horses’ (50K more servers) to cater to our photo addiction - this number would increase to 1 ton of CO2 .
Please Consider Environment Before Uploading Your Photos On Facebook
‘Green computing‘ remains a buzz word in 2008 & subsequent years. However the BIG question is with plethora of options for Green Web Hosting available - shouldn’t Facebook, the most successful contemporary social network, consider one?
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