All of us are connected to the virtual world using various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp etc. The power of social media is known to everyone. It just takes a matter of seconds that one on the other end of the world is able to know about the activities is happening all over the world.But has anyone ever tried to understand what is behind the mechanism? Or how the data is maintained and utilized of around 2.19, million monthly users? There needs to an extraordinary amount of designing and technology behind the whole process. So how big are the data centers?
Currently, Facebook has 10 data centers in the world namely Los Lunas, NM, Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC, Altoona, IA, Fort Worth, TX, New Albany, OH, Clonee, Ireland, Lulea, Sweden and Odense, Denmark. These data centers are huge in infrastructure measuring about 307,000 square feet. That’s actually more than the length of 2 football fields combined together. Everyday data of around 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data is generated by Facebook.Each data center has tens of thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and are also linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. This goes like as every time an information is shared over Facebook, the servers in these data centers receive the information and distribute it to our friends. A lesser-known fact that it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data each half hour. That’s stupendous!
This doesn’t stop the billion dollar company to extend its frontier. Now, Facebook has also laid undersea cables across the Atlantic Ocean connecting Virginia, the USA to Bilbao, Spain. The cable has the capacity of transferring 160 TB of data per second which is an equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time and 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection. This is truly technology at its best.
Many of us might have experienced sometimes when the facebook application is down. This affects the millions of customers at the same time. Just imagine the impact and the level of triaging required to bring back up the application. It takes hardly 2 hours to make the application is functional mode.
Trillions of data get queued at the same time, but it does not affect the data servers residing in the data centers as a whole.
The data centers are technologized in a such a way that it just takes on an average of 3 mins for the data security engineer to find the flaw in the exact data servers which is located in the facility.
Facebook is not keeping any limit to the data servers. It is ever growing to handle the demand of use of the virtual platform to connect to people.This has been estimated that they have around 200 petabytes of storage, growing by several terabytes a day.
This is actually beyond imagination how these are being maintained at such a level.
Satyaki 