Humans are pretty excessive creatures by nature.
We like it when stuff occurs in large amounts, for example:
- Money.
We all wanna be rich. Disagree? Not buying it.
If I had a million bucks and gave it to you, would you bin it?
Didn't think so.
- Food.
Might not apply to everyone, but a lot of food 'aint a bad thing :)
I know I like a big meal!
- Waste.
Man oh man we humans are Professors of Waste.
Go and Google the amount of waste that a single cruise ship generates for example. It's sickening stuff.
- Humans.
How many of us are there on the planet?
More than a handful I would guess...
You get my drift.
We like excess, and that includes data - we generate crazy amounts of data on a daily basis.
I do not know the figures offhand, but just take a moment to consider the millions of people who are online right this second, doing their thing surfing, downloading, uploading, streaming, emailing, using VOIP, Facebook-ing, tweeting, hacking, backing up, syncing their devices to the cloud, using remote desktop, Teamviewing, IRC'ing (do they still do this? :)), Dropbox'ing... man I could go on all year, and all of next year probably as well!
The point is, huge amounts of data require a serious infrastructure.
Now I am not talking about your corporate office server room with a few rack-mounted switches and a handful of servers.
We are talking Google type stuff here, and I gotta say I look at things a little differently when I stop to think that as I am typing this post, my data is being saved live into a datacenter like one of these Google monsters...
Click each image to enlarge and see the description of each facility:
Little bit crazy, 'aint it?
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