Download and upload — two words most of us are very familiar with, but do we really know what they mean? Did you send or receive and email today, visit a website, make a Google search, sign in to Facebook, send a text, stream a video, or share a photograph? If you did any of those things, you were downloading and uploading data, but where does the downloaded data come from, and where is the uploaded data going? We say that we use the internet and backup our files to the cloud, but where is the internet; what is the cloud? Are they real, tangible entities or are they as amorphous as they sound, existing somewhere beyond time and space.
In reality, data, which is nothing more than bits and bytes of numerical information, does indeed go somewhere tangible. It goes to data centers all over the globe to be stored and retrieved as needed. These data centers are networks of very powerful computers, called servers, owned and operated by thousands of companies and organizations. These computers perform very different functions than our personal computers. The servers run dedicated software designed to preform specific functions. They wait for requests from other machines (known as clients) and respond to their requests. Some of the types of servers are: file servers receive, store and send data files; web servers store webpages; mail servers receive, store and forward emails; media servers transmit digital video and audio; game servers enable computers and gaming devices to play multiplayer games; database servers maintain and share organized collections of data; application servers host application software that can be utilized without being installed on individual computers.
Millions of servers run continuously around the world and virtually every internet connection requires one or more interactions with multiple servers. The physical size of a large data center varies from 400,000 to more than 1 million square feet. Such centers house thousands of servers, all of which require tremendous amounts of electricity for power and cooling. The amount of electricity used in a large data center is equivalent to the amount used by a small town.
A online search for Google data centers identified fourteen locations, seven in the United States, one in South American, two in Asian and four in Europe. In 2013 Google’s data centers housed 900,000 servers that consumed 260 million watts of power, enough to consistently power 200,000 homes.
Facebook operates three data centers in the United States and in 2013 it opened its first center in Europe. Located just inside the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden, this state of the art Data Center is one of the most energy efficient centers in existence. Powerful computers generate a great deal of heat, and one of the most critical aspects of maintaining a data center is temperature control, which in most cases involves massive air conditioning units. At the state-of-the-art Swedish facility the frigid arctic air is filtered and piped into the building in lieu of air conditioning. Facebook’s data centers are online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. As of January 27 of this year, Facebook had 1.591 billion monthly active users, between 2004 and 2014 over 400 billion photo were uploaded, 7.8 trillion messages were sent and in 2014 31% of US senior citizens use Facebook.
I want to thank TR Times reader Norm from Golf View who inspired this column. After reading the February 5 issue, he called and asked if I could write a column describing how Amazon Prime members can take advantage of the option to store unlimited photos in the cloud. I plan to cover that topic in next week’s column, but first I wanted to describe a context for cloud storage.
note: The information in this column was compiled from a variety of internet based sources, including business dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo!; PC, Cloudyn Blog at cloudy.com, ZDNet, StorageServers blog, theatlantic.com and expandedramblings.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment