data centres

Social networks are not the only risk. Companies are increasingly storing proprietary data offsite, in a scattered "cloud" of data centres.

Last month the company opened two data centres that between them will contain more than half a million servers.

All over the world companies are putting together networks of data centres packed with thousands of servers, known as "computing clouds" .

Last month the company opened two data centres that between them willcontain more than half a million servers.

In most data centres, administrators do not even know which programs run on which servers.

The shift to mobile computing and data centres (also known as "cloud computing" ) has speeded up the "verticalisation" of the IT industry.

At the moment, data centres perform many conversions between alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC).

To understand the technology needed to industrialise data centres, it helps to look at the history of electricity.

Just as much of hardware has become a commodity , knowing how to build huge data centres may not be a big competitive advantage for long .

The data centres that contain the cloud, each often the size of several football pitches, cannot be built just anywhere.

Yet Amazon is not the only big online company to offer the use of industrial-scale data centres.

In fact, over 80 percent of the major data centres in Asia-Pacific are running at close to 90 percent capacity and space is at a premium.

It has built a network of data centres, and is starting to gain traction after losing billions developing online services.

He remembers a picture that Google showed him of one of its data centres burning to the ground; it looked awful.

So far, however, optical technology has been confined mostly to telecoms networks and some of the cabling in data centres.

The company believes the new chips can help with an energy crisis that is threatening to cripple data centres worldwide.

That outfit has built a network of data centres in which virtual machines and disks can be launched in seconds.

Similarly, most corporate data centres today house armies of "systems administrators" , the craftsmen of the information age.

Microsoft plans to enter this field, in effect offering to run companies' computer systems for them inside its own giant data centres.

That in turn led to another overload, eventually triggering a series of failures that toppled Google's data centres like falling dominoes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which rents computing capacity in its giant data centres to customers, has also won a reputation for being cheap.

This means that all three will have ample resources to spend in the main areas of the fight: data centres, cloud services and the periphery.

Some of them have been floating the idea of "free-trade zones" for data centres where common rules would apply.

The companies' 10 data centres will be reduced to four and their four networks will be rolled into a single global network.

Companies are increasingly storing proprietary data offsite, in a scattered "cloud" of data centres.

It has also committed more than $1bn this year to building data centres in North and South Carolina, where electricity is cheaper.

The clouds allow computing to be removed from metal boxes under desks and in firms' basements to remote data centres.

It has already built a global network of data centres and developed an operating system in the cloud called Azure.

As data centres require ever more power to operate, they're increasingly being located near existing power generation or cooling resources.

An underwater cable linking West Africa's computers to Europe's data centres is due to come ashore in South Africa.

To make sure that its web-search results show up almost instantly, Google has to distribute its data centres around the world.

Although PCs, mobile phones and networks will account for most (56%) of this, emissions from data centres will grow the fastest.

Although hardware stays in one place, "virtual machines" consuming processing power can jump around, even between far-flung data centres.

The researchers claim ECS can more than halve the energy consumption of processors in data centres at "little or no operational cost" .

But a small fraction of drives will fail in any given year, especially under the heavy, continuous use typical of data centres.

Apple is known to be investing heavily in data centres suitable for cloud hosting.

Cloud providers, he says, have more expertise in running data centres and benefit from a larger infrastructure.

And data centres can get only so big before scale ceases to be an advantage.

Google is even thinking of building floating data centres, cooled by seawater and powered by the waves.

Much is at stake: this year companies will spend about $100 billion on data centres, according to IDC, a market-research firm.

At some point, cloud providers may find themselves compelled to build data centres in every country where they do business.

The criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving, says Mike Manos, Microsoft's director of data centres.

Firms with excess computing capacity, such as data centres, put it up for sale.

Few data centres are designed to maintain such conditions for long if the power goes off, though.

Data centres are essential to nearly every industry and have become as vital to the functioning of society as power stations are.

Get info about Google PR data centres for your web site.

Cisco, the world's biggest maker of networking equipment, has announced new technology to link up separate data centres.

By locating their servers at exchanges or in adjacent data centres traders can maximise speed.

It has built a global network of three dozen data centres with 2m servers, say some estimates.

This means that all three will have ample resources to spend in themain areas of the fight: data centres, cloud services and theperiphery.

It has already cut the number of its data centres from 68 to 25.

The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume.

Windows 7 reflects a shift of computing from PCs in homes and offices to the "cloud" : relying on huge data centres.

Is the growing power consumption of data centres a threat or an opportunity?

The cloud's data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes.

Each has its own global network of data centres.

They will, after all, be out of a job if companies no longer maintain their own big data centres.

In data centres, Google is ahead, but Microsoft is catchingup in size and sophistication.

Monitor and correct dysfunctioning of all backup systems for all servers located in the different Data centres.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1. 5 per cent of US energy use.

According to IDC, a market-research firm, a quarter of corporate data centres in America have run out of space for more servers.

The firms that run data centres are lessforthcoming.

His study found that US data centres' power consumption in 2005 was equivalent to the output of five 1, 000-megawatt power stations.

The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many data centres in Quincy.

This number is approaching 90, 000 for Amazon's data centres on America's East Coast alone (see chart).

For Facebook, the deal provides a mountain of extra cash to invest in things such as new data centres and acquisitions.

As companies have more and more operations hosted in remote data centres, they could take advantage of different tax regimes, says Mr Manos.

Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers.

The corollary ofmore computing in the sky is more and bigger data centres on earth.

These data centres use a lot of energy.

So IDC thinks that many data centres will be consolidated and given a big makeover.

Optimised protection for applications such as data centres.

Deploying the latestkit could cut the power consumption of data centres in half, according to theEPA.

Many of the world's computers, networking and storage systems live in the huge data centres run by banks.

They include Qihoo 360 and 21Vianet Group, a company that runs internet data centres.

Thus, cloud computing companies need data centres in places such as Dublin to keep these data for their European clients.

America alone has more than 7, 000 data centres, according to IDC, a market-research firm.

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