Facts and Stats of World’s largest data centers

For all those who are eager to know about some facts and stats of the largest data centers in the world, here is some informative analysis.

Google 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 900,000 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.

Facebook 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. In the year 2012, Facebook has come up with its Prineville data center which is 62,000 square feet in dimension. It houses around 500 cold storage racks, which can hold around 2TB of data and each rack uses around 2 Kilowatts of power. It is estimated that Facebook servers process around 2.4 billion pieces of content and 750TB of data every day. The standard storage rack in Facebook data center facility uses 8 Kilowatts of power. Facebook has data worth over 100 PB capacities in its facility which is derived from a three tiered storage system. As per the recent press release, Facebook has admitted that its users utilize around 7PB of photo storage from its facility every month.

Amazon 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.

 

Some more 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. In order to maintain business continuity and as a part of disaster recovery planning, eight data centers in the world are having 7 containers of modular data centers each (approximately- Not official) filled with 1000 servers each.

4. Thus, with the usage density of servers, data centers account to 17% of carbon footprint of the global Information and Communication Technology sector.

5. As per the survey results conducted in 2011, over 38% of large companies were expected to exceed IT capacity within 18 months.

6. Data centers more than 7 years old are considered out of date as per Green Computing norms. However, in practical the average life of a data center is considered to be 9 years.

List of World’s Largest Data Centers

• Digital Realty- Based in Chicago, this data centers has a backup of 53 generators and utilizes 8.5 million gallons of cooling fluid per year. It is 1.1 million sq ft in size and was converted to telecom use in 1999.

• Quality Technology- This Atlanta based data center was built in 1954 and was used by a government organization. Later, in the year 2000, this 990,000 sq feet facility was leased out to a telecom company to carry IT operations. Quality Technology is supported by 80 megawatts of power capacity and may be extended with an investment of $150 million in 2014.

• Terre Mark- This 750,000 sq feet facility was constructed in 2001 and is a centralized infrastructure for over 183 networks.

• Microsoft Chicago- Chicago based data center operating for Microsoft is a 700,000 sq ft facility which was converted to telecom use in 1999. This facility contains 40 foot shipping containers which have 2k servers each in them. It requires 8.5 million gallons of cooling fluid and has a total capacity of 224,380 servers (fairly accurate).

• Microsoft Dublin- Microsoft’s data center based in Dublin can be considered as a good example for a data center working as per green computing norms. This data center amazingly doesn’t use cooling towers and uses less than 1% of water used by traditional data centers. The dimension of this data center is 550,000 sq ft and details of PUE will be updated shortly.

• i/O data center- This phoenix based data center is a 538,000 sq ft server farm which is backed up by renewable energy. This server farm has solar panels which generate around 4.5 Megawatts of power.

• DuPont Fabros- DuPont Fabros is a 485,000 sq ft data center which is supported by diesel generators producing 32.2 Megawatts of power.

• Microsoft Washington- Microsoft data centers located in Washington and San Antonio are 470,000 sq feet facility each and are backed up by hydro electric power. Each month both these facilities use 8 million gallons of water, which is then channelized to a recycling system.

• Switch Communications- This Las Vegas based data center facility is 470,000 sq feet in dimension and is now almost 5 years old. It can hold 7k cabinets of servers and has 250 megawatts of capacity. The power density of this facility is around 1400 watts per sq foot.