Facebook data cost: Over Twenty Million – Quickcast

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express – Get a 30 day free trial

Josh Chandler is a regular contributor to Vator.tv. Recently, he wrote on the financial standings of Facebook. He has graciously offered it for Podcast conversion. If you have a blog or article that you would like featured on the Quickcast, drop me a line at 608-205-4378 or Geekazine at gmail dot com.

“Facebook spends between $20 million to $25 million alone on the space that houses its servers”according to reports from a recent InsideFacebook.com article, this comes as reports today from Techcrunch.com wrote that Facebook.com, the world’s most popular social network is receiving potential offer of a $200 million stake from Russian investment firm “Digital Sky Technologies“.

Now, it’s hard to tell where all this data consumption is taking place, one would suspect it is within the photo storage facility which receives 500GB of data every day, over 850 million photos every month. Back in April Facebook developers had to do a complete rewrite of the photo storage facility to implement a new storage standard called HayStack, which was supposedly 50% faster then any “traditional photo storage system”, Bobby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook said in a ComputerWorld.com interview that “In terms of cost, if it’s twice as efficient, we can have 50% less hardware. With 50 billion files on disk, the cost adds up. It’s essentially giving us some [financial] headroom”

The hardest to imagine and most unrealistic part of Facebook’s data operations, is that they don’t even own the infrastructure,they lease space from Digital Reality Trust and DFT, which obviously has caused sharp increases in costs, as the user base has grown. DataCenterKnowledge.com showed the key data towards Facebook‘s costs.

Facebook pays $10.9 million a year for 114,000 plus  square feet of space in two Silicon Valley data centers (leased out by Digital Reality). Rackspace recently said in an SEC filing that it is paying about $5 million a year for server space in the same data warehouse as Facebook.

With all these absurd investment opportunities that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook seems to be adamantly rejecting, where do you think the buck stops before the likes of Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Growth, Mobile and International at Facebook step in and tells Zuckerberg directly  that they need some money before things get out of hand. Something tells me, based on the kind of person Mark Zuckerberg is like, it wouldn’t be the case.

Whether or not Facebook accepts ANY money in the near future, there will always be a sense of gratitude towards one certain individual who joined Facebook.com with a very religious based Facebook App, which will certainly keep investors knocking at the door for some time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:32 — 2.5MB)