From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 34

version of Google and Facebook combined, announced that it would spend
$1.6 billion to build a new cloud center in Yangquan, Shanxi Province,
covering 120,000 square meters (about thirty acres), roughly the size of
the U.S. Pentagon, one of the largest standalone buildings in the world.
The Yangquan facility will contain the capacity to store 4,000 petabytes
(PB) of data (1 PB equals 1 million gigabytes; see the following table).
When completed in 2016, it will deploy 700,000 central processing units.
Drawing comparisons and making estimates is always perilous, but it has
been estimated that digitizing the entire collection of print, audio, and
video stored in the collection of the Library of Congress would amount
to roughly 15 terabytes of data. The storage capacity of the Baidu cloud
center would therefore enable it to house the data equivalent of 268,000
Libraries of Congress.
F roM M egaByTes To Z eTTaByTes
1,000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (GB)
1,000 GB = 1 Terabyte (TB)
1,000 TB = 1 Petabyte (PB)
1,000 PB = 1 Exabyte (EB)
1,000 EB = 1 Zettabyte
When it opens in 2016, the Baidu center will set a new standard for
data facilities, but those operating now are far from small. As of December
2013, the largest existing cloud data center was a 400,000-square-foot
structure, part of a 2.2-million-square-foot interconnected collection of
data centers operated by the Switch corporation in Las Vegas, where the
absence of natural disasters provides a margin of safety. Admittedly, data
centers of this size are at the outer edge of typical cloud data centers, but
the trend is to build ever-larger ones because size provides eficiencies that
are needed as data storage and processing demand continues to grow. In
fact, China, in a joint venture with IBM, is in the process of building
its own “cloud city” in Langfang, an old industrial district near Beijing,
that will cover over 6 million square feet of facilities, including a giant
data center and ofices to house IT development companies (Zhu 2013).
The corporation Cisco, a major participant in the cloud industry, has
put together an index of global data-center trafic. These are estimates,
but they provide a general sense of the growth in the sheer amount of data