The numbers are certainly impressive: since opening its first
datacentre on its Redmond, Washington campus, Microsoft
now has over a million servers hosted in its 100 plus data
centres scattered across the globe.
With its networks processing roughly 1,5 million requests
per second, Microsoft’s fiber optic network can stretch to
the moon and back three times!
It also puts a focus on sustainability – 16 carbon offset
projects have been invested in by Microsoft, including projects in Brazil, Cambodia, China, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Mongolia, Peru, Turkey and the United States, whilst
100% of its servers and electronic equipment get sent to a
third-party vendor for recycling and/or reselling after it has
been securely decommissioned.
Facebook
Facebook requires massive storage infrastructure to house
its enormous stockpile of photos, as well as an extremely high level of connectivity to ensure that the massive
amounts of traffic to its site runs smoothly on a daily basis.
To this end, the company has its own data centres located
in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; Luleå,
Sweden and Altoona, Iowa (Facebook also operates out of
a number of smaller shared locations).
For example, in building its Sweden facility, Facebook was
aware that the country has a vast supply of cheap, reliable
power produced by its network of hydroelectric dams. Just
as important, Facebook has engineered its data centre to
turn the frigid Swedish climate to its advantage. Instead of
relying on enormous air-conditioning units and power systems to cool its tens of thousands of computers, Facebook
allows the outside air to enter the building and wash over its
servers, after the building’s filters clean it and misters adjust
its humidity. Unlike a conventional, warehouse-style server
farm, the whole structure functions as one big device.
Facebook’s latest Iowa facility is also the first to use its new
high-performance networking architecture. With Facebook’s
new approach, the entire data centre runs on a single
high-performance network. There are no clusters, just server pods that are all connected to each other. Each pod has
48 server racks — that’s much smaller than Facebook’s old
clusters — and all of those pods are then connected to the
larger network.
This modular approach has already allowed the social
networking giant to increase its intra-building network capacity ten-fold compared to the old design and the company
believes that a 50x improvement is possible. What’s more, it
publishes its data centre designs online for anyone to copy.
It’s also very forward-thinking in how it deals with the intense requirements put on its systems.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/14/facebooks-newest-data-center-comes-online-in-altoona-iowa/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-03/facebooks-new-data-center-in-sweden-puts-the-heat-on-hardware-makers
Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Datacenters and Network Fact Sheet November 2014
http://www.google.co.za/about/datacenters/
www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq
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