Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries.

If McDonald’s ever goes out of business, perhaps Google can buy up its empty buildings and use them all as data centers.  A representative of the search giant recently stated that he’s working on a storage and computation system capable of accommodating 10 million servers.

If Google ever gets its hands on 10 million servers, that means it’ll have one for every person in New York City and Phoenix, Arizona.  Or if you want another point of comparison, we found out earlier this month that Facebook only has around 30,000 servers.

MySpace has taken a rather huge step towards reducing its data center costs: The company announced that it’s replaced old servers using mechanical disk drives with Fusion-io’s flash memory products, and the benefits are almost literally off the charts.

According to a statement, "The power and cooling costs of Fusion’s ioDrives are less than one percent that of the hard disk arrays, and rack space usage is reduced to zero, as ioDrives are embedded directly within even the smallest of servers." 

Although the maximum length of tweets remains locked at 140 characters, Twitter itself is turning into something of a giant.  This morning, there’s news that the site managed to beat MySpace in terms of UK Internet visits, and it also seems to have caused a data center specialist to find new facilities.

Let’s hit the MySpace-related development first.  In truth, Twitter’s accomplishment here isn’t as impressive as it might sound; Twitter’s conquest is probably due more to MySpace’s fall than its own rise.

With regards to data centers, it looks like Microsoft’s moving full speed ahead.  The company has announced that it will open not one, but two "mega" data centers in July, and some of the technical specs are rather astounding.

In a somewhat literal sense, Yahoo appears to be on the move again.  A fresh report indicates that the company’s very interested in building another data center, and Lockport, New York has been identified as one likely location. 

Google’s new data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, is all set to go.  A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held yesterday, and so the search giant has pretty well signaled that it’s ready to forge ahead (in at least this one way) despite the recession. 

Four months ago, a report claimed that the act of performing two Google searches produced as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle of water.  Google wasted little time in disproving the idea.  Now, the search giant’s returned to the concept and tossed out even more comparisons to show how "green" it is.

The top three things Google seems to consider when building data centers are real estate costs, electricity costs, and, perhaps, privacy.  And the next generation of data centers may do extremely well in all of these respects, as Google’s been granted a patent for water-based data centers. 

A little more than five months ago, we documented a rumor that Google would build a data center in Australia.  Now, although everything’s still up in the air, a new report indicates the search giant isn’t exactly tripping over itself to start construction or buy an existing facility. 

Google’s never been too chatty about its data centers; the search giant is slow to even confirm the centers’ physical locations, never mind discuss what’s going on inside.  But at the Data Center Efficiency Summit, Google spilled a few secrets, and there’s definitely some impressive technology in place. 

Google is buying a paper mill site in Summa, Hamina, Finland, and replacing it with a data center. How’s that for symbolism?

Paper company StoraEnso signed an agreement to sell its buildings and most of the Summa Mill site to Google for about €40 million. They did agree that part of the site would be transferred to the City of Hamina for "other industrial uses."

If you want to compare servers to Hallmark products, Microsoft is no longer the little old lady who buys a shopping cart full of Christmas cards on December 26th.  Instead, the company has decided to send cards to fewer people and save its money for 11 months.  Or, to drop the metaphor, you might just say that Microsoft’s delayed the construction of a data center.

LinkedIn has opened a new data center in Chicago. A post at the LinkedIn Blog says:

LinkedIn has grown by leaps and bounds this past year and currently we are adding professionals to our site at the rate of one user per second.  The primary goal for the LinkedIn Operations organization is for our site and partner applications to be available 24/7.