Servers supporting Web 2.0 are very real – and very costly
Business Week reports that Facebook’s new pile of cash will be used to buy servers. They currently have 10,000; they’ll get 50,000 more. Yet they’re way behind Google and MSN in the computing arms race.
Om Malik draws some conclusions on this as well.
In Web 2.0 terms, servers mean storing as much as processing. Traditionally servers were all about crunching the numbers. Even today, high-end servers doing the transactional heavy lifting in businesses of all types rely on the fastest disk drives – even enterprise SSDs – but require little capacity.
Changing IT as we know it
Facebook’s investment is a stark example of how hardware in general and storage in particular are a very necessary part of our growing cyber communities.
These are early days. Expect continued acceleration in these kinds of investments, and watch for the consequences of such a large techno-economic shift.
[…] Facebook’s real world stretching to match its virtual world Tweet June 4, 2012 – 10:58 am | By Mark Wojtasiak | Posted in Companies, Data Center, Technology | Tagged data center, Data Center Knowledge, facebook, Facebook Data Center FAQ, Facebook data centers, Facebook IPO, Facebook vs Google, how big is facebook?, how many servers does facebook have?, top internet companies, top websites on the internet, wonders of the world | Comments (0) […]