Google’s Datacenters on Punch Cards
If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google’s data warehouse be?
James Zetlen
Google almost certainly has more data storage capacity than any other organization on Earth.
Google is very secretive about its operations, so it’s hard to say for sure. There are only a handful of organizations who might plausibly have more storage capacity or a larger server infrastructure. Here’s my short list of the top contenders:
NSA
NRO
NGIP
CIA
Schlumberger
Tencent
Chevron
Honorable mentions:
Amazon (They’re huge, but probably not as big as Google.)
Facebook (They’re on the right scale and growing fast, but still playing catch-up.)
Microsoft (They have a million servers,[1] although no one seems sure why.)
Let’s take a closer look at Google’s computing platform.
More: Google’s Datacenters on Punch Cards
As a reminder, it goes byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terrabyte, petabyte, exabyte… O_o