#892 How many servers are in a data center?

How many servers are in a data center? It depends on the company and the type of server, but the average data center appears to have about 100,000 servers in it.

When I am talking about data centers, I mean the kind of place that stores all of the information on the Internet. It is estimated that there is about 300 Zettabytes of data on the Internet. How much is that? 1 Zettabyte is 1000 Exabytes. 1 Exabyte is 1000 Petabytes. 1 Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes and 1 Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes. So, 300 Zettabytes is 300,000,000,000,000 Gigabytes. And, of course, technology is improving and becoming more data intensive. It is estimated that another 180 Zettabytes of data will be created this year. We will probably reach 1 Yottabyte by 2026. All of that data has to be stored somewhere so that we can watch videos of cute cats falling asleep in their food every day. (Half of all the data on the Internet is video.)

So, where is all of that data? It is on millions and millions of servers across the world. Every page or piece of data on the Internet is hosted by a different company. For example, the cat videos we are watching on YouTube are hosted by Google (or their parent company Alphabet). No one knows how many servers Google owns, but in 2016, it was estimated to be 2.5 million. YouTube has grown exponentially since then, so the number will be an awful lot higher. Google has these servers spread out around the world. When you want to watch that video of a cat, you click the link for the relevant page on YouTube. Your computer sends a digital request that goes to your Internet provider asking it where the cat video is. The ISP accesses the Domain Name Registrar, which is a list of every domain on the Internet and the server it is located on. Once your ISP has this information, it can direct your computer to the relevant server where the cat video is saved. The server connects to your computer and sends you the information that is the cat video. This server could be on the other side of the world, and we complain when the cat video doesn’t load inside two seconds.

So, how many servers are in a data center? Most companies, such as Google, keep this information secret. They need to be very secure, so they protect their data centers and the information contained within to the best of their abilities. They are usually very large buildings and the majority of their space is given over to the servers. The servers are built into racks and one rack can hold between twenty and forty servers. There are also server systems known as blade servers. They can hold more servers in a smaller space than a regular rack can, increasing the number of servers the data center can have. Many data centers appear to have between 50,000 and 100,000 servers. They could probably have more, but there are a few limits and problems that they have to overcome.

The first problem is that a data center requires an enormous amount of power to run. They can use almost as much power as a regular sized town. It takes a lot of electricity to keep so many servers running. That is also a problem that is getting worse year by year. Computers are becoming more powerful, and they are requiring more power all the time. It is estimated that by 2030, the power consumption of servers will have doubled as the power the processing units necessary for AI. This doesn’t take into consideration the fact that there may very well be more efficient processors, or even different technologies invented before then.

The second problem is the heat they produce. Your desktop computer has a fan to keep it cool. If you are reading this on your phone, then you know that your phone will heat up if you use it for a long time. 100,000 servers produce an enormous amount of heat, and they need to be cooled so they don’t break. This is another reason why they use so much electricity. There is a data center in Norway that is built into a mountain and uses sea water to cool the servers. The water becomes heated up and this can then be used to produce electricity for the local community. They are trying to become completely green.

As the power of computers increases and file sizes get larger and larger, this is a problem that is going to become huge in the next ten years or so. And this is what I learned today.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-mining-rig-1148820/

Sources

https://www.racksolutions.com/news/blog/how-many-servers-does-a-data-center-have/

https://greenmountain.no/

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-data-center-power-consumption/