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The Photos application is one of Facebook’s most popular features. Up to date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo sharing website. For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates to a total of 60 billion images and 1.5PB of storage. The current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. These numbers pose a significant challenge for the Facebook photo storage infrastructure. NFS photo infrastructure The old photo infrastructure consisted of several tiers: Upload tier receives users’ photo uploads, scales the original images and saves them on the NFS storage tier. Photo serving tier receives HTTP requests for photo images and serves them from the NFS storage tier. NFS storage tier built on top of commercial storage appliances. Since each image is stored in i...

Facebook these days is doing everything in its power to imitate Google, recruiting the search giant’s sales people, poaching its senior executives and — most importantly — using infrastructure as a competitive advantage. Like Google, Facebook has figured out that the right web infrastructure is the difference between user delight and dismay. And like Google, Facebook is finding out that it isn’t cheap. I’ve been trying to get a handle on Facebook’s infrastructure for some time, but so far have been unable to get the company to open up. The last time I reached out to them, back in January, I was hearing that they had between 1,200 and 1,500 servers, along with storage and switches from EMC Corp. and Force 10 Networks respectively. As it turns out, those server numbers weren’t even close to the total servers used by them. The company is running around 10,000 servers, according to Data Center Knowledge , citing comments made by Facebook VP of technology, Jeff Rothschild, at a re...