Facebook Revealed As Behind $1.5B "Catapult" Data Center In Iowa 82
Earlier this month, an article raised the question of who owns the giant data center being built in Altoona, Iowa. Today, the Des Moines Register has an answer, gleaned from "legislative sources." The giant facility, estimated to cost $1.5 billion when construction is complete, is to house a data center for Facebook. The article lists various attributes the site has to make it attractive for all that data, including access to transportation, extensive network infrastructure, and relatively low risk from natural disasters.
Exaggeration for bragging rights (Score:2, Insightful)
They're just talking up the price, the price spent on data centers is part of the marketing for the company and part of the demand to get tax backs from state governments for coming....
MY datacenter is bigger than YOUR data center.
and
WE'RE spending $1.5 Billion in your state so we want so tax back!
In reality small distributed data centers would be far better, and this most likely doesn't cost $1.5 billion.
Re:800 million active users per month = 16 per day (Score:4, Insightful)
According to this [fb.com], there's 680 million logins per day.
I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates [gigaom.com] are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.
So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.
I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.