Who Cares About Data Centers?

In the last Digital Den, I asked  “How Important Are Your Photographs?” Given that Facebook has over 140 billion photos, it made me wonder a bit about what’ll happen if an online repository like Facebook someday shuts down.

One thought led to another which then made curious to learn a bit more about data center usage, who’s the biggest, where are they located, etc.  I found some interesting information that I wanted to share.  First, let’s take a look at the 5 largest data centers in America.

To be honest, I was a bit surprised by this; especially that Facebook or Google didn’t make the cut. (They’re probably numbers 6 and 7.) So this made me dig a little deeper to see where some of the other social portals may rank and I came across this interesting graphic highlighting data center usage. You can see the full graphic below, but here are some key highlights:

  • Energy consumption from data centers accounts for 1.5% of electricity use in the US.
  • Energy demands of the Internet are increasing by more than 10% each year.
  • 700 Facebook status updates are made per second.
  • Google receives more than 1 billion searches daily.
  • Yahoo receives over 3,200 searches per second.
  • WordPress hosts over 18 million blogs with 310 posts every minute.

So who cares about data centers? Pretty much everyone.  The data center is the core of our digital lifestyle whether we use it for photographs, videos, music or something as simple as saving a term paper to the cloud.

 

Related Posts:
How Important Are Your Photographs?
Kodak: The End of an Icon?
Saving Yesterday for Tomorrow
Photography Addiction

2012-04-20T15:16:53+00:00

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