subject: Where Are The Biggest Data Centres? [print this page] Data is big businessData is big business. As the internet has quickly become integrated with our day-to-day lives, the amount of data that is being produced has also risen exponentially in the past few years. The move towards cloud hosting and cloud computing has also played an important part in the increase in data needing to be stored and accessed. People are beginning to move away from storing their files, music and videos on their own hard drive and are choosing to use the cloud for storage and computing options. The cloud brings a number of advantages as your data can be easily accessed wherever you are, whether you are at home, work or on the move. The tech giant IBM has claimed that 90% of data in the world today has been created in the last two years a massive increase which only serves to demonstrate how integral data has become to our society.
So why do cloud data centres and normal data centres alike have to be so big? Many of the biggest data centres in the world cover hundreds of thousands of square feet. The simple answer is that data takes up space. There is a concept of data that sees it as something that is not tangible, many people will think of it much like their perception of the internet in that it exists on our computers but there is no real life counterpart. This is a poor assumption to make. Data has to be stored somewhere and it will usually take up space on a physical server. This server has to be put somewhere and in the majority of cases this will be in some sort of data centre. In order to be able to store and access huge amounts of data, thousands of servers will be needed. It is therefore simple to see how the size of data centres can easily grow to thousands of square feet.
There are a large number of huge data centres around the world and it can be difficult to compare them when you are trying to work out which one is the biggest. For example, there are a range of different types of data centre facilities. There are single-building dedicated data centres but there are also mixed use buildings that incorporate data centre space with office space. There are also multi-facility data centre campuses. Data Center Knowledge, a blog dedicated to data centres, put together a list of what they considered to be the largest data centres in the world in 2010. The list, while extremely interesting, has quickly become outdated as new data centres are constantly being planned and built.
Due to the differing and changeable natures of many data centres, it would be very difficult to provide a definitive list of the biggest data centres in the world. This article instead aims to look at some examples of the largest data centres in the world. An important contender that is still being built is Baidus cloud data centre. Baidu is often called the Chinese equivalent of Google and recently invested 10 billion yuan (or just over 1 billion) in the data centre project. The planned cloud data centre will cover almost 1.3 million square feet and is projected to be completed by 2016. It is estimated that the centre will be able to store 4,000 petabytes of data. To put it into perspective, 4000 petabytes is the equivalent of over 4,100,000,000 gigabytes.
Where can other huge data centres be found? A good example is the @Tokyo Data Centre in Japan. This huge centre has over 1.4 million square feet of space and is currently mostly dedicated to providing colocation facilities. Another worthy contender for the title of largest data centre is the Peelhouses Data Centre that is located in Scotland. The data centre is said to cover 2.9 million square feet which could definitely put it in the running for largest in the United Kingdom, if not the world. However, the technology company, Range Technology has recently partnered with HP to plan the construction of an energy-efficient cloud data centre. It is claimed that the cloud centre will cover a huge 6.2 million square feet and is due to be completed in 2016. Other contenders include the Lakeside Technology Centre (1.1 million square feet) and in the future another could potentially be Apples data centre in Prineville, Oregon. Though Apples current data centre in Prineville is only of a modest size (10,000 square feet) the work that has started on a 338,000 square feet expansion and the overall size of the plot of land (over 6.9 million square feet) suggest that the centre may become much, much larger.
Until an option is invented that will increase the storage capacity of servers or compress the size of data, it seems likely that data centres will continue to increase in size. These centres are effectively hugely important resources for the internet and its users, and as the internet becomes further ingrained in our lives, it is probable that their importance will only increase in the future.
