The State Of The Data Center

As web application and social media booms continue to fuel the Internet economy, businesses may view mobile devices as the driver for all that growth. But the mighty data center is what makes it all happen on the back end. It's the workhorse behind the cloud. Emerson Network Power recently pulled together some statistics to provide a picture of how the data center keeps businesses rolling. "Over the last several years, advances in technology, an increased reliance on the internet and social media as well as an increased focus on energy management initiatives have had a significant impact on the data center world," said Scott Barbour, business leader of Emerson Network Power. "Data centers are the unsung heroes."

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  The 509,147 data centers worldwide occupy 285,831,541 square feet of property.

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  That's the size of 5,955 football fields.

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  1.2 trillion GB of data will be generated over the course of this year.

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  That's like handing every person on earth 10 16GB iPods.

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  If you took all the information consumed by an hour's internet traffic, burned it to DVDs, and laid them side-by-side, they would span from the base to the peak of Mount Everest--95 times.

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  Based on a U.S. average, the 509,147 datacenters around the world experienced 2.5 complete outages each per year.

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  The length of the average data center outage was 134 minutes.

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  The world's datacenters log roughly 2,842,737 hours of downtime per year.

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  At a cost of $300,000 per hour, that's a loss of $426 billion per year.

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  In just ten years, the average server has jumped in compute capacity by a factor of 45.