Forget about the IPO...focus on the technology wonder that is Facebook

Guilty…I am a fan of Facebook…as are 900 Million others around the world. Sure there are things Facebook does that we don’t always agree with e.g. the redesign on 2009 (read: Facebook Poll: 94% of Users Don’t Like Redesign), but at the end of the day, their user base continued to grow, and their impact on creating an even smaller world is without argument.

The last couple weeks and the circus created by the media, the investor community, and perhaps even FB themselves around the IPO, and the follow-up news, opinions, investigations, and criticism seems to have shaped the image of the company and their CEO – at least in the tech circles.

I say forget about all that…they are a public company now, and as with any public company, they are open to the scrutiny of the “experts” out there that know more than anyone of us could possibly know about the business we are in (a bit sarcastic – I apologize). As a public company, they are responsible to more than themselves, and are required to continue to add value and grow their business. One way they can do this is to stick with what got them there – technology.

And no one covered Facebook’s data center strategy and growth better than Data Center Knowledge and their continuously updated “Facebook Data Center FAQ.”

Here are the top 10 reasons Facebook is a technology wonder:

Users: in eight short years Facebook eclipsed 900 Million users making it the busiest site on the internet.
Traffic: more than 1 trillion page views per month accounting for 9% of all internet traffic.
Integration: 1 million websites and 550,000 applications use Facebook Connect
Global Reach: more than 70% of traffic is outside of the US.
Scale: using a wholesale / leasing model, Facebook was able to get their data centers operable in a matter of months.
Expansion: massive build out of their own data centers meant greater customization in server design, power, and cooling.
Footprint: some estimates show Facebook has more than 60,000 servers in operation – and that was in 2010.
Innovation: Facebook’s Open Compute Platform has become a pseudo standard for cloud data center server design.
Engineering: Facebook, much like Google and others, has designed its own software and has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere.
Investment: has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure.

If interested in learning more, check out the latest updates from Data Center Knowledge’s “Facebook Data Center FAQ” where they talk specifically about the newest data center in Sweden.

Spoken like a true fan…not only of their service, but how they manage to make it all happen.

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