Facebook Now Hosts 220 Billion Photos

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Facebook's data centers house more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. User photo uploads have reached 300 million per day. (Photo: Rich Miller)

It's well established that Facebook now has more than 1 billion active monthly users. But what does that translate into in terms of the demands on its infrastructure?

At an Intel briefing earlier this week, Facebook VP of Hardware Design Frank Frankovsky attached some large numbers that illustrate the company's infrastructure challenge. Facebook now hosts 220 billion photos, Frankovsky said, with another 300 million photos being uploaded every single day. How many more photos have been uploaded while you've been reading this? The 300 million uploads a day work out to more than 208,000 photo uploads every minute of the day.

Facebook's data centers now store more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. "That is a fantastic amount of information," says Facebook VP of site operations Tom Furlong in this video from "How Do They Do It?", which is one of the better video tours we've seen. It includes rarely-seen shots of the racks of servers rolling into the Prineville data center, and also provides a look at how the Facebook team keeps all those servers running.

For a closer look at the technology inside Facebook's data centers, see these DCK videos:

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