Each of those innovative data centers represents the appropriate in school for a design or operational factor. Google’s employee sauna? That’s only a bonus.
Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook don’t just innovate with products: Just examine their data centers. The designs and operations playbooks of those new centers aim to lower costs, increase reliability and maintainability, and improve agility, while reducing energy use and carbon footprint.
As big data and cloud computing push the boundaries of traditional data centers, new trends in data center innovation have followed. Google started the ball rolling when it scaled up its search operations starting within the late 1990s. By 2001, Google, still three years far from its IPO, was building its own servers from piece-parts, seeking not just economy but additionally reliability and straightforwardness of maintenance. Previous to 2003, Google was investigating putting large numbers of servers in a shipping container. That year it applied for a patent at the idea of the modular, drop-in-place data center.
Back then, Google was saying little or no about its data center operations. a favourite Silicon Valley guessing game was to take a position on what number of servers the corporate ran. The hunt giant was gradually forced into more transparency by the rapid rise of Facebook, which discussed its operations intimately.
Google’s containerization patent was issued in 2007; it wasn’t until 2009 that the corporate confirmed that it have been installing modular, containerized server farms since 2005. Google is now quite chatty about its data centers.
Facebook built its first from-scratch data center in Prineville, Ore., open-sourcing the designs of everything it used — from servers and storage to networking or even the specifications for data centers themselves. In April 2011 Facebook announced the Open Compute Project, a non-profit charged with the stewardship of those hardware blueprints.
As Microsoft, Apple, and eBay began building large scale, cloud data centers over the last half decade, they joined the pioneers in searching for how you can reduce energy consumption of their data centers. Innovative power and cooling schemes multiplied. Soon the contest shifted to green energy: How much of an information center’s power will be supplied from renewable sources?
Each of right here cloud-scale data centers breaks new ground in some dimension of its design or operation — from modularity and efficiency to scalability and green energy — and every has something to educate us about how data center design is evolving. Take a better look.
Over a process greater than three decades, Keith Dawson has developed software, managed teams of architects, and worked extensively within the software development industry as a writer, editor, and pundit. He has written for Media Grok, Media Unspun, Slashdot, The CMO Site, and … View Full Bio
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