Why The New York Times Story 'Power, Pollution, And The Internet' Is A Sloppy Failure. Estimate: Facebook Running 180,000 Servers. {*style:<i>By: Rich Miller August 15th, 2012 </i>*} in Share The exterior of the Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon. (Photo credit: Alan Brandt). Like most large data center operators, Facebook doesn’t disclose how many servers it has running in its data centers. Hamilton starts with the total annual power draw for Facebook’s data centers – 509 million kilowatt hours – and estimates Facebook’s average data center power usage at 58 megawatts of power. This is the most detailed analysis of Facebook’s power usage I’ve seen.
But the numbers certainly support Hamilton’s broader point: that Facebook’s server count is growing fast. . [...] APPLE, AMAZON, GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT PREPARE FOR BATTLE IN THE WAY WE BUY, STORE AND ENJOY MUSIC, VIDEO AND BOOKS IN THE CLOUD. Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are prepared to battle in the heavens and on earth to be the go-to spot for buying, storing and enjoying music, video and books.
Over the past week, both companies have announced new products toward that aim, trying to entice consumers to store what they buy in the "cloud"—that is, over networks—instead of inside an actual device. Through such a service, consumers can access the digital entertainment that they own from a variety of portable gadgets. At stake is control over how people purchase and consume books, music and video. Wells Fargo analyst Jason Manyard said. "A major battle is going on among Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft for consumer Internet dominance. The battle isn't seen as "winner take all. " That may be why Amazon is offering its Fire tablet for just $199, a price tag widely thought to make little or no profit on sales of the device itself. iSuppli said. "The importance of this strategy cannot be underestimated.
Mr. Mr. Tech Titans Building Boom. The serene countryside around the Columbia River in the northwestern United States has emerged as a major, and perhaps unexpected, battleground among Internet powerhouses.
That’s where Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo have built some of the world’s largest and most advanced computer facilities: colossal warehouses packed with tens of thousands of servers that will propel the next generation of Internet applications. Call it the data center arms race. The companies flocked to the region because of its affordable land, readily available fiber-optic connectivity, abundant water, and even more important, inexpensive electricity. These factors are critical to today’s large-scale data centers, whose sheer size and power needs eclipse those of the previous generation by one or even two orders of magnitude. These new data centers are the physical manifestation of what Internet companies are calling cloud computing. The Great Tech War Of 2012. The Competition Among Google, Amazon, Facebook And Apple.
Hide captionApple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are expanding rapidly into markets like media, TV, movies, finance, advertising, retail and mobile phones.
Stephanie d'Otreppe/NPR In the old days, Amazon sold books, Google was a search engine, Facebook was a social network and Apple sold computers. But that's not the case anymore. Google and Apple now sell phones. Amazon has gotten into the server business. "We see them getting into the media business, TV, movies, books — but we also see them getting into the banking industry ... becoming part of the communications infrastructure ... and part of [other] transactions," says tech writer Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo's recent piece in Fast Company outlines how Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are competing with each other — and other companies — in markets for mobile phones, apps, social networking, retailing, advertising, finance and more. Manjoo is a staff writer for Slate. Helen Bailey/Courtesy of the guest Interview Highlights On Google+