I’ve just read that Facebook have just raised USD100mill all to “invest” in new servers. Apparently they’re going to move from the 10k current to 50k servers. Questions;
- 40k servers costing $100 million. That’s UD2500 per server. Sure there are some related real estate and infrastructure costs but this seems pretty excessive (especially at the sort of deals FB must get for hardware)
- Given that they’re spending this sort of money, why don’t they just move to a cloud computing model? Fact is if they’re to continue to grow (and they don’t seem to share my scepticism abut that), they’ll need to be able to scale their infrastructure. They need something elastic, self hosting doesn’t give that degree of elasticity
- Seems like a bit of a strategy straight out of legacy business models to me
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
USD100m is a big pile of cash; I am sure there are better uses than buying servers. Fortunately, most ISVs have more sense and would not buy 4 servers, let along 40,000. Provisioning server instances on Amazon EC2, or another cloud platform, is the only solution for “the rest of us”.
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