Comments on: How Facebook moved 30 petabytes of Hadoop data

By: Riaan Pietersen

Riaan Pietersen — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:16:12 +0000

This is fascinating! Huge amounts of data replicated. Job well done.
I think Facebook should look at engineering a system whereby small chunks of data is stored on users computers throughout the world and then collated in a torrent like fashion with caching happening in their data centres. Now that would be something! :)

By: Marty Perlman

Marty Perlman — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:52:05 +0000

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By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:16:35 +0000

Just to clarify, FB didn’t mention where it moved from and to. I suspect it was from an existing colo space to Prineville, but I could be wrong. And the move wasn’t about DR, it just proved that relatively fast DR is possible with HDFS.

The new data center it’s building is next door to the current one in Prineville, but FB is also building one in N.C., which is a long way from Oregon.

By: Ralph Stoos

Ralph Stoos — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:30:18 +0000

Redundent Data Centers next to each other? Shame on you.

By: Ralph H. Stoos Jr.

Ralph H. Stoos Jr. — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:27:34 +0000

You are not missing anything. They missed at least part of the CISSP course. I think they should move everything to the coast of Florida or Louisiana and wait for a hurricane. Doh!

By: DaninHouston

DaninHouston — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:49:20 +0000

ah, why would you build your disaster recovery data center, next door to your primary data center? what am i missing here?

By: Vivek Iyer

Vivek Iyer — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:54:30 +0000

Well considering the fact that its 30 PB .i think Facebook did a good job with data.But what happens If that second data center gets fulled?

By: Eric Baldeschwieler

Eric Baldeschwieler — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:31:23 +0000

Good stuff. Yahoo should talk more about its activity in this area. They operate roughly 20 large clusters in 4+ data centers for a total of >42,000 nodes. Many production apps run hot/hot so that there is no interruption of service in the face of datacenter failure. Many others run hot/warm with all the input data imported to 2+ datacenters simultaneously.

This scale of move is large even by their standards, but could be handled in stride by their excellent ops team. They’ve done plenty of full cluster moves as they have scaled up Hadoop.