Top 10 largest campuses "cloud" data centers

There are a lot of data centers in the world, and we have already told many of the most interesting ones, separately. Now let's look at the campus rankings of data centers - the largest of them serving cloud services from various companies, popular social networks, Internet of Things platforms and everything else. Generally speaking, cloud computing is developing very rapidly, with social networks playing a significant role in this progress. For such giants as Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, investments in cloud services have long been a familiar operation - these companies invest $ 1 billion or more in “server farms”.

10. Amazon (Ashburn, VA)

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Since Amazon is the largest player in the cloud area, the company's material and technical base should be appropriate. Indeed, Amazon owns a number of server farms distributed across clusters of data centers. These clusters, in turn, are divided into smaller objects, and their size is not so large. For this reason, Amazon and closes the list of companies - owners of the largest campuses of data centers.

By the way, Amazon’s rational decision was to create Availability Zones, allowing users to access their instances even if some of the DCs (or even several at once) are experiencing technical problems.

The largest Availability Zone is a region in Northern Virginia, USA, where more than 20 data centers are located.

9. Apple (Maiden, New York)

Apple is not a newcomer, but a relatively new player in the creation of cloud campuses. Until 2009, the company had not so many data centers. Following this, management decided to build a data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The data center was built fairly quickly, and now the company has not one, but several DCs in Oregon, Nevada, USA, as well as in Ireland and Denmark. Data centers serve iTunes and iCloud.

iDataCenter in Maiden covers an area of ​​46,450 square meters and is now supported by a small “strategic data center”, which was used to create a modular infrastructure. In North Carolina, Apple uses alternative energy sources, including two fairly large fields with solar panels and fuel cells from Bloom Energy.

8. Equinix (Ashburn, VA)

Loudon County is home to 60 data centers, with a total area of ​​5,57410 square meters. In the same district, construction of additional data centers is planned, with an area of ​​275,000 square meters. Most of them are operated by Equinix, which provides interconnection of networks of various companies. The first data center of the company was built in Osborne in 1998. The Equinix campus quickly became one of the largest and most famous. About 200 networks of various telecommunication companies intersect here. On October 15, the company decided to build 5 additional data centers. For 10 years, Equinix plans to invest about $ 1 billion to expand its infrastructure.

7. NSA (Utah)

It would be surprising if the National Security Agency with extensive wiretapping capabilities did not have an impressive network infrastructure. And indeed, in the state of Utah is located the data center of this organization, the creation of which spent about $ 1.5 billion. The total capacity of the data center is 65 MW. The area occupied by the object exceeds 150 square meters.

The organization has no public cloud services, as far as is known (and where do they come from?). But the opportunities for tapping and analyzing the data obtained from the NSA sea.

6. Digital Realty (Ashburn, VA)

This company is a colossus, one of the most famous players in the world of telecommunications. The largest data centers of the company are located in Dallas, Santa Clara and Chicago. Loudon County, which was already mentioned above, is home to 8 data centers of this company. Ninth is already under construction, and its cost is about $ 950 million. Soon, Digital Rality data centers will become even more. Now the total area of ​​DC companies in the region is more than 200 square meters.

5. DuPont Fabros (Ashburn, VA)

The DuPont Fabros company needs productive data centers, and creates them for itself. So, in Virginia, USA, she built a campus with data centers with a total area of ​​148644

square meters. The campus was launched in 2007, and is now one of the largest in the world. At the moment, the company itself and its partners have invested more than $ 1 billion in the creation of appropriate infrastructure in this place.

4. Facebook (Princeville, Oregon)

Much has been written about the data center of the social networking site Facebook, and so have we. The campus of the company's data centers in Princeville is a development of the idea of ​​the Open Compute Project. Here the company has installed custom servers, data warehouses. What is there - the design of the data center is also custom, the engineers have developed it as part of the Open Compute Project. Two huge data centers were built in Dayville, including several facilities with “cold data storage”. Facebook recently announced plans to create a third data center here. More than $ 780 million invested in the project.

3. Microsoft (Boydton, Va.)

Another major market player, Microsoft, owns at least a large cluster of data centers. The largest is located in a small town with just 400 inhabitants. Microsoft is rapidly developing its cloud services, and therefore expands its network infrastructure around the world. There is a DC in Boydton, which was created according to a modular IT-PAC project, the basis of which is containers. The modules work in almost any conditions, cooling is performed using external air. Air enters the containers through special blinds. Microsoft began construction of the campus in 2011. The total cost of the project is $ 1.7 billion.

2. Google (Council Bluffs, Iowa)

Google Inc. is one of the first to work with the "clouds". In the development process, the company built more and more new data centers and campuses. Now every four years, the corporation spends $ 2 billion on the development of its infrastructure data centers. In the future, the corporation plans to spend another $ 1.5 billion on the cloud campus in the Council Bluffs. Greenpeace assesses the power consumption of the corporation data centers in the Council Bluffs at 105 MW.

1. Switch SUPERNAP (Las Vegas)

The largest campus of data centers was built by Switch. The Las Vegas campus is called simply Supernap . Interestingly, the construction of the campus, albeit such a huge one - is not an end in itself. All this is part of a grand project. As mentioned earlier, in the state of Nevada, near Las Vegas, there are already existing SWITCH data centers. The IT site SUPERNAP in Las Vegas consists of three queues, two of which are SUPERNAP 7 and SUPERNAP 8 fully functional, and the third - SUPERNAP 9 at the final stage of readiness. The total production area of ​​the entire complex will be about 135,000 m2.

The top-level project is called SUPERLOOP, and it will help ensure that the delay in signal transmission in the Reno-Las-Vegas-San Francisco and Los Angeles “ring” will be reduced to just 7 milliseconds. Read more about the plans of the Switch here.

Most likely, the championship will not belong to the Switch for long - now a large number of major market players are engaged in cloud services. And the relevant infrastructure continues to evolve and expand. So we will wait for new achievements from the telecommunications giants!