What Makes an Awesome Data Center? – The World’s Top Ten
The 10 largest data centers all have one thing in common, which is efficient use of data center racks. These data centers are the very best in the world. The largest data center is over one million square feet. To put this into perspective the NFL standard size for a football field is 47,700 square feet. This means the largest data center, which is in Chicago at 350 East Cermak, at 1.1 million square feet is equivalent to about twenty-three football fields. Imagine looking out over such a vast array of computer servers and equipment in such a place. Awesome is a word that barely begins to describes this.
The Metro Technology Center in Atlanta is a close runner up with 990,000 square feet. Oh, how we wish they stretched just a bit more to add 10,000 square feet to hit that nice cool number of one million square feet. Nevertheless, this center is also awesome.
The rest of the top ten are 750,000 square feet or less and include:
- The NAP of the Americas in Miami;
- NGD Europe in Newport Wales;
- Container Data Center in Chicago;
- Microsoft’s center in Dublin;
- Phoenix One in Arizona;
- CH1 in Elk Grove Village (near Chicago) Illinois;
- 9A in Quincy, WA and 9B in San Antonio, TX (both Microsoft facilities), and;
- The Super NAP in Las Vegas.
The importance of design in these massive data centers is clear. They run the backbone of Internet traffic and are huge consumers of electrical power. Downtimes are intolerable, and energy-efficiency is a priority because in America they consume 1.5% of the total US electricity usage. The ICT sector contributes 2% to the Global Carbon Emissions. The amount contributed by the data centers in the 2% ICT Global Carbon Emissions figure is 14%. This is why green design for data centers is so important.
Smaller data centers that focus on Green Design are Green Mountain, Verne Global’s Kefavik Facility, HP’s Wynard Data Center, General Electric’s Louisville Facility, and Apple’s Maiden and Prineville Facilities.
These data centers serve some of the most famous and most valuable companies on the Internet that include Facebook with 1 billion active users, Twitter with 500 million active users, Yahoo with 500 million users Google with 400 million users plus 1.72 trillion searches annually or 4.72 billion per day and Apple iCloud with 190 million users.
Summary
Massive data centers are increasing efforts to apply green technology awareness in the designs. The next challenge is to make the largest data center in the world, which is based on green technology. That is not just awesome, that would be SUPER AWESOME.
