Taking a Vacation? Travel the World and See the Google Data Centers.

So where is the cloud? Where does your data go! I may have found it in Sweden, but it turns out there is more than just one cloud. A lot more! Like hundreds of thousands.

To most, this story will not be interesting, but to the select few who understand “1’s and 0’s” and the beauty of server farms, this TerraByte’s for you. Sounds cool right? Well here are some amazing facts and a peek inside the Google Data Center

Here is some info about the Google centers, FaceBook, Amazon and Microsoft data centers. They look like a box on the outside but are state of the art buildings.

coolers gogsGoogle Data Center

Google has around 13 data centers all through out the world. And by 2014, three such facilities are going to add to this list. As per the recent estimate conducted by Microsoft, Google has around 90,000 servers in all its data centers based in world. It is official now that Microsoft leads this table with 100,000 server count. Google’s data centers use around 260 million watts of power which accounts to 0.01% of global energy. This power is enough to consistently power 200,000 homes.

fb server farmFacebook Data Center

Facebook, a leading social networking website with around 1 billion users has its own server farms, designed and built by its engineers as per the norms of its open compute project. This farm was built on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Northern Sweden. This server farm is able to let go of air conditioning for cooling and instead just use fresh Arctic air. It is estimated that Facebook servers process around 2.4 billion pieces of content and 750TB of data every day.

amazon data farmAmazon data center

Amazon has around 450,000 servers in its data centers sited in 7 locations in the world. And from the year 2008 the company has spent around $86 million on its servers. It stores around 40 billion objects on it and is basically into cloud storage business. Amazon Web Services has around 40,000 servers dedicated to its cloud customers and gets around 17 million monthly visitors who access 410TB of data from its platform. Around 30 million of Amazon users stream around 40 PB of videos per month.

Microsoft data center

With a count of 1 billion users and 100,000 servers, Microsoft has so far spent around $23 billion on its data centers. In the year 1989, Microsoft came up with its first data center which was 89,000 sq feet. In the year 2006, it designed its own data center with 500,000 sq ft and in the year 2013 came up with a $112 million facility.

A Few Farm Facts

  1. A large data center has a capacity to use as much electricity as a small town in United States.
  2. The power density of a data center is 100 times more than that of a large commercial office building and is equivalent to 9 small sized shopping malls of Wal-Mart size.
  3. Heat from the servers can be used to help heat buildings in cold climates, thus reducing the energy consumption of conventional heaters. A large data center has a capacity to use as much electricity as a small town in United States.
  4. According to Green Computing, data centers older than 7 years are considered out of date. However, in practice the average life of a data center is considered to be 9 years.
  5. The world’s biggest data center is based in Chicago, and is backed up by 53 generators. It utilizes 8.5 million gallons of cooling fluid per year. It is 1.1 million square fit in size and was converted to telecom use back in 1999.
  6. Google has 12 data centers all over the planet, 6 of which in North America. Recent estimations predict that Google has more than 900,000 servers in all its data centers around the world. Google indexed more than 50 billion pages on all of those servers. This means that If each web page were a piece of A4 paper, a print version of Google’s indexed websites would be more than 1 kilometers high, slightly taller than El Capitan, the iconic granite monolith in Yosemite National Park in California —Now, that’s a book that’s longer than Lord Of The Rings.
  7. Google’s data centers use around 260 million watts of power which accounts to 0.01% of global energy. This power is enough to consistently power 200,000 average homes. Google tries to rely on renewable energy sources to power a number of its global data centers, and in the US the company has even begun generating renewable energy – by selling excess supply back into the grid.
  8. Amazon’s Data Centers has around 450,000 servers sited in 9 locations around the the world, most of them dedicated to its cloud customers.

And finally what would we do without “The Floating Data Center” by Google.

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