Previously, a typical Web crawl was supported by 10 or 20 clustered Linux servers, Kahle said. The new crawls are supported by the entire data center, as all 63 Sun Fire servers act as a single machine.

In addition to Web pages, the Archive also keeps software, books and a moving image collection that has 150,000 items in 100 different subcollections, as well as audio clips -- to the tune of 200,000 items in over 100 collections.

"We see this scale of machine, and the idea of putting machines outdoors is a potential long-term trend for organizations like us," Kahle said.

The Internet Archive also works with about 100 physical libraries around the world whose curators help guide deep Internet crawls. The Internet Archive's massive database is mirrored to the , the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt, for disaster recovery purposes.