New data pertaining to innovations and industry best practices implemented by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in its data centers have shed new light on the number of servers operated by the company. Based on an updated edition of an influential data center power consumption report by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey, Data Center Knowledge thinks that Google is probably running "about 900,000 servers."

In addition, a program manager on the Google Green Energy team has hinted that the company runs its entire infrastructure on about 220 megawatts of power. Given that Google is known to provision up to 50 megawatts of power for its largest data centers, this may suggest that the company is positioning itself for further expansion.

One thing is for sure: Google is preparing to manage ever larger fleets of servers in the future. Indeed, the design of a highly-scalable storage and computation system called Spanner was first mentioned by a Google engineer in 2009, and it could conceivably see Google managing services across entire data centers with up to 10 million servers in total.

Koomey's report is titled: "Growth in data center electricity use 2005 to 2010" and can be downloaded here. You can also read the summary of the report in The New York Times here.

For more:
- check out this article at Data Center Knowledge

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