This is one of those kind of questions whose answer can never be
accurate. On a funnier note, it is like asking our mother during our childhood
how many stars are there up in the sky??!!
Commonly a PC holds 500 GB of storage data and a smartphone holds about 32 GB, but as days
pass there are newer PCs and smartphones with bigger storage's than this. We
all know Google is the only one who can answer any
kind of question!! We simply conclude that Google knows everything!! And
Everything means Everything! Now you must be wondering how much data does
google handle to answer all these questions!!??
Yes it holds a whole lot of data to answer any kind of question
u ask it!! Google doesn’t provide numbers on how much data they store.
Google now processes over 40,000 search
queries every second on average (visualise them here), which translates to over
3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
A place where google stores and handles all its data is a data
centre. Google doesn't hold the biggest of data centres but still it handles a
huge amount of data. A data centre normally holds petabytes to exabytes of
data.
Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day
through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its massive
computing clusters. The average MapReduce job ran across approximately 400
machines in September 2007, crunching approximately 11,000 machine years in a
single month.
Google is also very much interested in collecting users data
like photos to improve their ad delivery system.
Now, What are these new terms? Petabytes or Exabytes? Haha, Dont
be worried,the highest data size even i have heard till now is Terabyte(TB). 1
Petabyte(PB) = 1024Terabytes(TB) 1 Exabyte(EB)= 1024Petabyte(PB) An exabyte can
be understood as 1 million Terabytes(TB). So , from this we can slowly
understand this huge amount of data. Google uses its data centres as well as
collaborates with other data centres to store their data. Each data centre
would cover an area of 20 Football fields combined. Its hard to calculate this huge
amount of data. But with some educated guessing using the capital expenditures
at remote locations and electricity consumption at each of the data centres and
number of servers they have respectively, we can come to a conclusion that
Google holds 10-15 Exabytes of data. This equals to data of 30 Million PCs
combined. So now when someone stops you somewhere and asks you how much data
does google handle!! You can boldly answer that Google handles 10-15 Exabytes
of data.
Google processes its data on a standard machine cluster node
consisting two 2 GHz Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading enabled, 4 GB
of memory, two 160 GB IDE hard drives and a gigabit Ethernet link. This type of
machine costs approximately $2400 each through providers such as Penguin
Computing or Dell or approximately $900 a month through a managed hosting
provider such as Verio (for startup comparisons).
The average MapReduce job runs across a $1 million hardware
cluster, not including bandwidth fees, datacenter costs, or staffing.
The January 2008 MapReduce paper provides new insights into
Google’s hardware and software crunching processing tens of petabytes of data
per day. Google converted its search indexing systems to the MapReduce system
in 2003, and currently processes over 20 terabytes of raw web data. It’s some
fascinating large-scale processing data that makes your head spin and
appreciate the years of distributed computing fine-tuning applied to today’s
large problems.
