Top 10 largest campuses of "cloud" data centers

There are a lot of data centers in the world, and we have already discussed many of the most interesting ones individually. Now let's look at the rating of campuses of data centers - the largest of them serving the cloud services of various companies, popular social networks, Internet of Things platforms and everything else. Generally speaking, cloud computing is developing at a very fast pace, and social networks play an important role in this progress. For giants such 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, Virginia)

Since Amazon is the largest player in the cloud, the company's material and technical base must 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 closes the list of companies that own the largest campuses of data centers.

By the way, quite a reasonable decision on the part of Amazon was to create Availability Zones, which allow users to access their instances even if in some of the DCs (or even several) there are technical problems.

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

9. Apple (Maiden, NY)

Apple is not a newbie, but a relatively new player in the creation of "cloud campuses." Until 2009, the company did not have many data centers. After that, management decided to build a data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The data center was built quite quickly, and now the company has not one, but several DCs in Oregon, Nevada, the USA, as well as in Ireland and Denmark. Data centers serve iTunes and iCloud.

The iDataCenter in Maiden covers an area of ​​46,450 square meters, and now it is 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, Virginia)

Laudon County is home to 60 data centers, with a total area of ​​557,410 square meters. In the same district, the construction of additional data centers with an area of ​​275,000 square meters is planned. Most of them are operated by Equinix, which provides interconnection of networks of various companies. The company's first data center 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. Within 10 years, Equinix plans to invest about $ 1 billion in expanding 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. Indeed, in the state of Utah, there is a data center of this organization, for the creation of which about $ 1.5 billion was spent. The total capacity of the data center is 65 MW. The area occupied by the facility exceeds 150 square meters.

The organization does not have public cloud services, as far as it is known (and where do they come from?). But the possibilities for wiretapping and analysis of the received data from the NSA are sea.

6. Digital Realty (Ashburn, Virginia)

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. Laudon County, as discussed above, is home to 8 of its data centers. The ninth is already under construction, and its cost is about $ 950 million. Soon, Digital Rality data centers will become even larger. Now the total area of ​​the company's DC in the region is more than 200 square meters.

5. DuPont Fabros (Ashburn, Virginia)

DuPont Fabros needs production 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 now it is 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 the appropriate infrastructure in this place.

4. Facebook (Prieville, Oregon)

Much is already known about the data center of the social network Facebook, much has been written by us. The campus of the company's data centers in Prineville is the development of the Open Compute Project idea. Here the company installed custom servers, data warehouses. What is there - the design of the data center is also custom, the engineers developed it as part of the Open Compute Project. In Prieville, two huge data centers were built, including several facilities with "cold data storage." Facebook recently unveiled plans to create a third data center here. More than $ 780 million was invested in the project.

3. Microsoft (Boydton, Va.)

Another major market player, Microsoft, owns a no less large cluster of data centers. The largest is located in a small town with only 400 inhabitants. Microsoft is rapidly developing its cloud services, therefore, expanding and network infrastructure around the world. In Boydton there is a DC created by the modular project IT-PAC, the basis of which is containers. The modules work in almost any environment; cooling is done using external air. Air enters containers through special louvers. Microsoft began construction of the campus in 2011. The total project cost is $ 1.7 billion.

2. Google (Council Bluffs, Iowa)

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

1. Switch SUPERNAP (Las Vegas)

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

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

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