Around the Net
Where Google And Microsoft Store Data
- Venture Beat, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 12:50 PM
Ever wonder where the search engines store data and how much power it takes to run the data centers that collect and store the data? An enormous amount of data gets collected and stored daily. Tom Cheredar takes us inside five of America's largest data centers. He tells us it takes 11 diesel generators to power Microsoft’s 700,000-square foot data center in Chicago, which stores data for XBox Live, the Bing search engine, email service Hotmail, and more than 200 other sites. Twitter’s QTS Metro data center in Georgia supports and stores data for 100 million active users, and it takes 19 diesel generators.
The diesel generators do not run the data center; they are there in case the backup UPS systems run out of juice and the grid electrical feed is not operating due to a power outage.
For the most part, diesel generators (size of a small train engine) are rarely used except for maintenance tests. They are a big polluter and local regulations tend to be strict.
Having built a data center in Las Vegas, the generators are really an insurance - part of the SLA with hosted clients.