• Question: hi my name is max i have a question how big are the dater centres

    Asked by care138put on 10 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Femi Olushola

      Femi Olushola answered on 6 Dec 2021: last edited 6 Dec 2021 1:34 pm

      Data centres vary in size, from the size of a small room to the size of a university campus. A data centre is lake your USB or hard drive for storing data. You could actually call your USB storage device your own personal data centre. However, for companies that store a lot of information and need a lot of computing power, a data centre can be very big and frequently called hyper data centres.

      Have a look at a few data centres in the link below:
      https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-architecture-awards-2021/

      PS: I think working in a dater centre may be more fun for most people 🙂 (Just a little joke there)

    • Photo: kristina kerwin

      kristina kerwin answered on 6 Dec 2021:

      Hi Max. That is a very good question. The size of a data centre (or DC) would depend on the type of its business model and can house thousands or just a few servers. There are 4 main types of DCs: hyperscale, enterprise, colocation and edge. Hyperscale DCs are super-sized data centres run by major companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook housing hundreds of thousands of servers at various locations. Enterprise DCs are smaller and usually owned by a business and operated on-site. An example would be a data centre run by a university, hospital or small and medium businesses. Colocation data centres are businesses that lease out their space, equipment and services to different clients and can house both hyperscale and enterprise clients, so these DCs are very big. Edge data centres are located near the user populations and are similar to the enterprise data centres but are managed off-site or by a colocation company. There are many data centre virtual tours available on youtube if you want to explore further. This is an interesting video: “Inside a Google data center”.

    • Photo: Steve Bowes-Phipps

      Steve Bowes-Phipps answered on 6 Dec 2021:

      Some are the size of a small cupboard (these tend to be in small organisations), and some, especially the largest owned by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, etc are the size of several football pitches!

      Some may argue that, with the rise of personal computing with smartphones that are increasing in power every year, you have an ‘edge’ data centre in your hand! Especially when you can use your phone to turn your oven on or off, monitor the temperature of your fridge and control the brightness and colour of your lights in your house.

    • Photo: Jack Bedell-Pearce

      Jack Bedell-Pearce answered on 6 Dec 2021:

      Our data centre in Byfleet (near Woking) is 21,000sq foot, it has space for 240 racks (which is like a big metal cupboard of servers) and can use up to 1MW of power. Our Gatwick data centre is bigger – it is 40,000sq foot in size, can hold over 400 racks and can use up to 3Mega Watts of power! Here’s a short video of the Gatwick data centre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYI1i6ivJZc&t

    • Photo: Richard Clifford

      Richard Clifford answered on 7 Dec 2021:

      Hi Max,

      Great question, the sizes varies depending on it’s purpose but I would say for the larger scale the average is about 1.5 football pitches in size and one of the largest in the world being 54 football pitches in size!

      But there are all shapes and sizes, even using old buildings and converting them in to supercomputers like this old church

      https://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/252456791/A-datacentre-in-a-church-Welcome-to-the-Barcelona-Supercomputing-Center/3/MareNostrum-Inside-the-BSC-supercomputer

    • Photo: Paul Jones

      Paul Jones answered on 7 Dec 2021:

      The facility I help manage at the moment is around 50,000m2 currently with plans to add another 25,000m2 in the next few years… that means it will be as big as 11 football pitches…

    • Photo: Mo Shivji

      Mo Shivji answered on 8 Dec 2021:

      Some are very big , some are very small.

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