Tech | April 06, 2009 | 13 comments

Facebook Spending Over $1 million on Electricity Per Month

source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/facebook-completes-rollout-of-haystack-to-stem-losses-f...

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ninthstate
Clearly Facebook is not the greenest company out there given this. Seems like a big price to pay for being able to tell people you're cooking dinner right now. This article raises the question; Is it environmentally conscious to have Facebook storing your numerous photos and videos?

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Facebook Completes Rollout Of Haystack To Stem Losses From Massive Photo Uploads
38 Comments
by Michael Arrington on April 6, 2009

One nugget of information Facebook leaked out to press last week during the Gideon Yu fiasco: the company has been EBITDA profitable for five quarters, but doesn’t expect to generate positive cash flow until 2010. Why the discrepancy? There’s only one answer to that - Facebook is paying out big dollars for something that must be depreciated over time. If they could just write off the expense in full as they paid it they’d be having much bigger losses now that matched cash flow, and they’d hit profitability sooner. But accounting rules let them pay cash now and recognize the expense later on. In early leaked projected financials, there was a $200 million difference in 2008 cash flow and EBITDA profitability (or lack thereof).

What have they been buying? Stuff to serve up all these massive page views, and photos in particular. In our post last October, when Facebook was fishing for dollars in Dubai, we noted some of their expenses, including a massive ongoing outlay for NetApp storage systems that cost $2 million each:

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

As we noted in February, Facebook is the largest photo application on the web (forgetting everything else they do). More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month, and these things chew up bandwidth and storage like crazy. And it’s even more expensive to serve photos in poorer countries where Facebook is getting all its growth (and little revenue).

Enter Haystack

Haystack is Facebook’s way of substantially lowering the cost of storing and serving photos, and the rollout of the new internal infrastructure was recently completed. See Niall Kennedy for a technical overview of what Haystack is and why it’s so much more efficient than third party solutions they’ve used to date, as well as this 2008 presentation by Jason Sobel.

What isn’t clear is if Haystack will really help Facebook control costs outside of the U.S., particularly in Asia. But it’s a step in the right direction for cost control, and is certainly being factored in Facebook’s estimates of cash flow profitability by next year.

CrunchBase Information
Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded: February 1, 2004
Funding: $516M
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    Community,   Tech,   Green,   Culture,   4 more
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    News,  Culture,  Green,  Tech,  39 more
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13 comments // Facebook Spending Over $1 million on Electricity Per Month

  • elizajanenspain
    • 0
      elizajanenspain  

    • Stop it you undereducated Unread people talking such bull about SOLAR ~! What the Heck do all of you own STOCK in Coal and Gas companies or WHAT????
      Germany has bought ALL of the SOLAR that ASIA can make ...and ASIA can not keep up with GERMANY'S DEMANDS ! One such Company called MOTECH runs 24 / 7 and they still can NOT keep up with Germany's DEMANDS !
      Top it off >>>>American gets MORE SUN than EUROPE !!!
      We are 30 Years Behind Germany !!! Not Days but Years !!!! 30 freaking Years !!!!!
      President Obama gave all these Madoff bankers Hand Outs ,Welfare for the RICH BOYz in America
      Nothing he has said he would do Has he done ....No Health Care No Solar and More and More WAR !
      California has a Solar Company and they are 3 years behind !!!!
      Just Think President Obama could of took the Money these Already Rich CEO's got from OBAMA and Used that Money to Build Just One SOLAR FACTORY ! And Had people Educating all these people !!!
      President Obama was a Liar before he even took office ....I seen on the Dem.com web site all the Politicians who ttok money from Health Care Co.'s and Pharm. Co.'s and this President TOOK the MOST money ....He was a Lying .......and he still is !! Where is our Solar Power Plants ???? But insists we will use CLEAN COAL ! How Ignorant American people really are to believe that COAL can be Clean ??? Never will it or can it be clean ....and look at what these Greedy Bast***S are doing to our Lanscapes in America ???

    • 3 years ago
  • hfm1996
    • 0
      hfm1996  

    • I think they should definitely use solar-power, it would be clean and efficient, and they would still be able to keep the pictures and other data.

    • 3 years ago
  • matlaroche
    • 0
      matlaroche  

    • about time someone raised this VERY IMPORTANT point, people need to STOP uploading their boring photos of their crappy lives onto the web.

    • 3 years ago
  • testafi
    • 0
      testafi  

    • For all of the money and awareness raised on facebook towards causes like The One Campaign, Kiva, Fair Trade Now, Stop Human Trafficking, Save Darfur, Toms, Revo, and the list goes on; is a very good amount.

      Solar would be great but that's a lot of solar panels.

      It costs $30 million to create a solar power plant to power 3500 homes (in Cloncurry, North- West Australia... Complete desert). If each home's electric bill is at least $150 that's still $475,000 short of the amount of electricity needed to power something so powerful.
      Solar is not the answer yet.

    • 3 years ago
  • rick_smith
  • Anyother
  • elizajanenspain
  • lordsbassman
  • Found_Avenue
  • sammysoul
    • 0
      sammysoul  

    • I think social networking and web search sites a la Google will become comparable in their energy use to heavy industries like steel mills.
      When they reach a certain scale it will probably be feasible to build their own power plants on site just like steel mills have them. Hopefully there will be enough public pressure for them to use renewable energy, like concentrated solar power.
      After all it doesn't really matter where the location of these data centers is. I believe Google already tries to source a big chunk of its electricity demands from hydropower. As long as they create additional renewable capacity and not just displace regular demand, I think it could have an overall positive environmental impact to have our images stored electronically.

    • 3 years ago
  • ninthstate
  • el_chivo
  • queenofit
    • 0
      queenofit  

    • So I guess that 1 million for electricity may off set the 32 sq ft of rainforest I saved on that little flower application they have going on their site.

      just saying....

    • 3 years ago
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