It’s an obvious fact that Google will surely house more data on their storage drives than anyone else in the world. Of course, most of it is secretly swept under the carpet and the carpet’s rolled and stored away in the attic. But that’s the way it rolls. The company spends over $12 billion on building ‘stuff’. The total power consumption is something that can shed some light on how many data centers the company actually operates. Back in 2010 it was established that Google consumed 258 megawatts of power. A little math keeping in mind their energy efficiency policies, cooling facilities and the number of total data centers reveals that they may be consuming a total power of 215 watts per server. Power usage and data center spending estimates bring about an approximate number of 1.8 million to 2.4 million servers, alive and serving Google. If each server had around 4 TB to offer we can draw a figure of up to 10 exabytes of storage space! That’s 2 exabytes more than what the commercial storage industry produces annually.


If you’re scratching your head about how much is an Exabyte then well, it equals 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data! That’s a lot. The NSA datacenters come in a close second with a capacity of 3 – 12 exabytes of data.

[Via – What-If]