The best trick for locating secret Google facilities might by the one revealed by ex-Googler talentlessclown on reddit.
The easiest way to find manned Google data centres is to ask taxi drivers and pizza delivery people.
Google previously was using about 215 watts per server.
By the end of 2013, the total amount of money they’ve pumped into their datacenters will be three or four times what it was as of 2010. They’ve contracted to buy over three hundred megawatts of power at just three sites, which is more than they used for all their operations in 2010.
Based on datacenter power usage and spending estimates, my guess would be that Google is currently running—or will soon be running—between 1.8 and 2.4 million servers.
But what do these “servers” actually represent? Google could be experimenting in all kinds of wild ways, running boards with 100 cores or 100 attached disks. If we assume that each server has a couple of 2 TB disks attached, we come up with close to 10 exabytes[10] of active storage attached to running clusters.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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