A look at the fully-packed racks inside a Facebook data center facility.

The information below is from a fantastic article from DataCenterKnowledge.com:

“How many servers does Facebook have? For some time now, the stock answer has been “more than 10,000 servers,” a number the company began using in April 2008. Facebook has continued to use that number, even as it has soared past 300 million users and dramatically expanded its data center space.

“Today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” Rothschild said during the Q&A session following his talk, adding that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis.

That places Facebook among the largest Internet companies that have publicly discussed their server counts, but still well behind hosting providers Rackspace, 1&1 Internet and OVH, which each house more than 50,000 servers in their data centers. See Who Has The Most Web Servers for more date on the largest infrastructures.

20,000 Servers In 18 Months
It also suggests that Facebook has added about 20,000 servers since early 2008, which explains why it borrowed $100 million in May 2008 to fund server purchases.

Rothschild also shared some huge numbers associated with Facebook’s photo storage operation, which now stores 80 billion images (20 billion images, each in four sizes). Rothschild said the real challenge isn’t storage, but delivery. ”We serve up 600,000 photos a second,” he said.

25 Terabytes of Log Data – Daily
The amount of log data amassed in Facebook’s operations is staggering. Rothschild said Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data, which he said was the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

Rothschild also discussed the effectiveness of the company’s engineering operations. Facebook currently has about 230 engineers on staff, who manage data for more than 300 million users. Rothschild said that ratio of one engineer for more than 1 million active users has been Facebook. ”We believe engineers at Facebook have a dramatic impact.””

Julie emailed me to tell me to watch this interview last night.  Daniel Hesse (Sprint’s CEO) talked with Charlie Rose about the future of wireless technologies and 3G vs. 4G.

I have been getting all of my contacts updated in my Gmail Address Book.  Last week I synced my Facebook contacts with Gmail and this week I learned LinkedIn has an address book exporter.

If you want to imprt your LinkedIn contacts with Gmail, here are the steps:

1. Sign into LinkedIn.com
2. Go to the address book exporter
3. Export all of your contacts to a .csv file
4. Open the CSV file in your favorite spreadsheet editor (Excel, OpenOffice etc)
5. Delete any rows you don’t care about, or data that doesn’t exist in your Gmail address book
6. Put a header row at the top of your spreadsheet to tell Gmail what each column of data represents.  For instance if “John” is in the column name that column “First Name”.



7. Save your spreadsheet somewhere handy like your desktop
8. Open your gmail contacts and click the import link (top right-hand corner of the screen)



9. The rest is pretty intuitive so I’ll leave that up to you.  If you have any problems let me know.

I have a need…a need for storage (you thought I was going to say speed didn’t you)!  I have an insane amount of hard drives so I really enjoyed the post from Backblaze which is a data storage service via the cloud.  The post has a great deal of detail on how they were able to build a 67 terabyte server for under $8,000.  Check out the full post here.  Backblaze provides their customers with unlimited storage for only $5 a month.

For those who care, I’m trying out the latest and greatest Firefox (3.5.4pre) code named “Shiretoko” and I’m absolutely loving it.  It is lightening fast, I would argue it is just as fast as Chrome which is really saying something.  I can’t speak to the Windows/Mac version but the Ubuntu version has been rock solid for me and I’m loving the performance boost.  Looks like it isn’t going to be released until October but I’m impatient and am glad I am because it is really awesome.  Has anyone else tried it yet?  Oh and for those running a Mac, they say it is also comparable to Chrome speed.

Here is a list of things you can do with Google search.