For many businesses, data centres are already an essential part of their storage and processes. Luckily, data centres and cloud storage are now affordable for practically any business, with business-grade cloud storage starting at as little as £0.40 per gigabyte, per month.

While many people use data centres, few give much thought to what they look like. As some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, we can certainly expect Google, Microsoft, and Facebook’s data centres to be works of art.

Google

Google has data centres around the world, in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Chile, Oregon, Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland, the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium. With a company the size of Google, multiple separate data centres are essential to building true redundancy and ensuring that the business can function even if several data centres go down. It probably helps that they have a moat with alligators too.

You can find out more information on Google’s data centres or even take a short guided tour (virtually, of course) below.

Microsoft

This year we discovered that Microsoft are testing underwater data centres, which would reduce the need for cooling technology and improve energy efficiency. Since they’re responsible for over 3% of the world’s electricity usage, we can expect a lot of tech firms to be looking for solutions to this issue.

While they may look slightly less impressive than Google’s multi-coloured LEDs, these centres are incredible nonetheless.

Facebook

If Microsoft are taking notes from Ariel’s book for their data centres, Facebook’s approach definitely sounds more like a Bond villain – they keep their data centres cool by building some of them near the Arctic circle. If you post any sort of Facebook activity in Europe, it’s likely that your information is stored in sub-arctic Lulea. Over 350 million photographs get added to Facebook every single day, so it’s essential that their data centres can cater to their 1.65 billion users while minimising consumption – by building in such a cold climate the centre is 70% less energy intensive.

If you’d like to find out more about data centre benefits and see just how affordable data centres are, please get in touch.