World's Largest Server Farm

Mumbai, India (AP) - A massive “googlebyte” server farm is being built in a remote corner of India, according to sources familiar with the project. The project is being financed by Silicon Valley giant Google, Inc. If completed on schedule in 2010, “[the server farm] will increase the total amount of installed computer storage capacity in the world by several orders of magnitude,” according to industry analyst Mark Larfey of BuildingStorage.com.

A googlebyte is the largest possible measurement of storage capacity. It is based on the number googol, which is a 10 followed by one hundred zeros. It represents several quintillion times the capacity of the largest current installations of around one petabyte (or one billion megabytes).

“To put this in perspective,” Larfey says, “if each byte of data stored in a googlebyte were the size of a grain of sand, then this server farm would be a thousand times the size of the Sahara Desert. If those grains of sand were laid end to end, they would stretch from the earth to the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”

A senior engineer familiar with the project says the googlebyte farm is being built near the small village Lirpagar, in southern India’s Sloofayad region, an area that has to date not benefited from recent growth in the Indian IT sector. The server farm is so massive, it will require the construction of three separate nuclear power plants in southern India to provide electricity to power and cool it, sources say.

Google management could not be reached for comment about the project or its anticipated cost. But sources say the estimated cost are in the $1.8 trillion range, equal to more than twice the entire current GDP of India.

Google has developed other server farms in various locations, “but nothing even close to this scale,” Larfey said. Construction of the googlebyte farm is slated to begin the first of April.

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