Neil Blakey-Milner, a production engineer for Facebook’s core systems, says Facebook’s construction of its own data centres is helping to scale the world’s largest social media site.
Blakey-Milner, a South African working for Facebook in California, USA, was speaking at Scale Conference, Cape Town, yesterday and said approximately one billion people visit Facebook on a monthly basis, with 618 million people accessing the site on a daily basis.
Facebook has to serve billions of profile pictures and 160 million newsfeed stories, and records an approximate 2.7 billion likes and 2.5 billion posts per day as well as 250 million photos.
“When you’re dealing with tens of thousands of servers leasing space from someone whose job it is to make a lot of money by leasing servers… it doesn’t make sense to use them and so we decided to build our data services,” said Blakey-Milner.
Blakey-Milner added building the data centres is something Facebook has never done before. The data centres “are not small”, they were built to handle the tens of thousands of servers Facebook requires.
The first Facebook data centre was built in Oregon, USA. Blakey-Milner said Facebook did not want to stop at one data centre and so a second was built in North Carolina, USA, and the third in Sweden.
“It was dramatically successful,” said Blakey-Milner on the data centres. “We learned a bunch of lessons building our primal centre, it helped us to understand what to do better.
One aspect Blakey-Milner said helped them operating the data centres better was “not spending a lot of money on things other than the servers’ operation”.
He added: “For example, we don’t have air conditioners in our data centres, we use… evaporative cooling and a bunch of other things so we don’t need to have air conditioners that use power.”
Furthermore, Blakey-Milner provided details on power conservation to further reduce costs and maximise efficiency at the data centres. The power conversion techniques resulted in the data centres using 38 per cent less power.
