10 Billion Facebook Photos - Is That Ecologically Sustainable?

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?

Inspiration

In the last couple of years, I've been doing things a bit differently than how I used to.

Started thinking about working collectively, about people management (managing their skills with the job at hand), managing them according to "our" needs than only my needs, business approach as compared to a media approach, Zero error processes (you can take my word from the least grammatical/spelling errors in this note), more pro-active, being a bit less aggressive, etc etc etc.

Today, Nikhil (my ex-boss at Starcom and good friend) exchanged some notes on Facebook and were talking about what's happening in our lives, progress and professional stuff. He actually brought light to the fact that I have changed.

Suddenly, as I work with my entire team in office on a huge pitch... this Facebook conversation strikes me...as I get into some introspection and think to myself...I've changed!!!! just as you know one day that the grass on the lawn has grown and needs a mow but don't realize this each day I look at it!

I remember Nikhil's words in the converasation "Agree Ravi is a big inspiration to all of us and whats even more heart warming is that in spite of not working with him, he still has an influence over YOU :)"

My previous notions were "You define your destiny and you decide what you must do!" but I was proven wrong and I can take Nikhil's word for it. It's been this man, Ravi (and not to forget Nikhil) who has changed the way I think about life (professional or personal). In fact, I started blogging due to the mere fact that I've been following Ravi's blogs and trying to get the most of what is written and I'm writing this as I checked Nikhil's message and then read Ravi's updated blog on risk.

All I would wish to say is ...Ravi, thank you for this :)

ways of learning new things

I was chatting on fb with my friend Aabha and as we were discussing work and personal life...she was telling me about her hectic schedules and no time to have a personal life. I asked her about her old hobbies like dancing which she could still pursue.....hmmm....it was "kathak" and randomly we started talking about which "gharana" of kathak is she learning from, the gurus of that gharana and some new, younger stars of kathak these days.

The talk about the dance form continued for a couple of minutes and I asked her if she was wondering how I knew so much about kathak! She did ask me how.

Simply, I told her that i used to learn this form of dance when i was 6 yrs old and continued it for some 17 months and to the extent that i had shaved off my head to learn this.

This form of conversations (and not the dance ;)), i make with many people and on random topics i don't have knowledge about. With this conversation going on...side by side...i was surfing (the easiest way to find information on "kathak") on Wikipedia.

If I do such conversations practically with all my buddies/aquaintances, imagine the amount of knowledge I would gain!!!

Knowledge is what needs to be pursued...not the ego that is based on the current knowledge you have!

How we show ourselves calm that too under pressure

Taken in Milano Centrale station, this photo manages to capture the hurried rush of two people running to catch their trains. But at the same time, being taken in black and white, the photo miraculously makes the central station seem very calm and organized.