A First-Ever Look At Google's Secret Data Centers


Douglas County, Georgia
From Google: "Blue LEDs on this row of servers tell us everything is running smoothly. We use LEDs because they are energy efficient, long lasting and bright."

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is opening a virtual window into the secretive data centers where an intricate maze of computers process Internet search requests, show YouTube video clips and distribute email for millions of people.

The unprecedented peek is being provided through a new website unveiled Wednesday at http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/(hash)/ . The site features photos from inside some of the eight data centers that Google Inc. already has running in the U.S., Finland and Belgium. Google is also building data centers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Chile.

Virtual tours of a North Carolina data center also will be available through Google's "Street View" service, which is usually used to view photos of neighborhoods around the world.

The photographic access to Google's data centers coincides with the publication of a Wired magazine article about how the company builds and operates them. The article is written by Steven Levy, a journalist who won Google's trust while writing "In The Plex," a book published last year about the company's philosophy and evolution.

The data centers represent Google's nerve center, although none are located near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

As Google blossomed from its roots in a Silicon Valley garage, company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked with other engineers to develop a system to connect low-cost computer servers in a way that would help them realize their ambition to provide a digital roadmap to all of the world's information.

Initially, Google just wanted enough computing power to index all the websites on the Internet and deliver quick responses to search requests. As Google's tentacles extended into other markets, the company had to keep adding more computers to store videos, photos, email and information about their users' preferences.

The insights that Google gathers about the more than 1 billion people that use its services has made the company a frequent target of privacy complaints around the world. The latest missive came Tuesday in Europe, where regulators told Google to revise a 7-month-old change to its privacy policy that enables the company to combine user data collected from its different services.

Google studies Internet search requests and Web surfing habits in an effort to gain a better understanding of what people like. The company does this in an effort to show ads of products and services to the people most likely to be interested in buying them. Advertising accounts for virtually all of Google's revenue, which totaled nearly $23 billion through the first half of this year.

Even as it allows anyone with a Web browser to peer into its data centers, Google intends to closely guard physical access to its buildings. The company also remains cagey about how many computers are in its data centers, saying only that they house hundreds of thousands of machines to run Google's services.

Google's need for so many computers has turned the company a major electricity user, although management says it's constantly looking for ways to reduce power consumption to protect the environment and lower its expenses.

The company's data centers are located in: Berkeley County, South Carolina; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Douglas County, Georgia; Mayes County, Oklahoma; Lenoir, North Carolina; The Dalles, Oregon; Hamina, Finland; and St. Ghislain, Belgium. Other data centers are being built in Quilicura, Chile; Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/google-data-centers_n_1973046.html

Council Bluffs, Iowa
From Google: "Inside our campus network room, routers and switches allow our data centers to talk to each other. The fiber optic networks connecting our sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling."

Courtesy of Google

The Dalles, Oregon
From Google: "These colorful pipes are responsible for carrying water in and out of our Oregon data center. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled."

Courtesy of Google

Hamina, Finland
From Google: "Server floors like these require massive space and efficient power to run the full family of Google products for the world. Here in Hamina, Finland, we chose to renovate an old paper mill to take advantage of the building's infrastructure as well as its proximity to the Gulf of Finland's cooling waters."

Courtesy of Google

Berkeley County, South Carolina
From Google: "In case anything should happen to our data, we have it all backed up. One of the places we back up information is here in our tape library. Robotic arms (visible at the end of the aisle) assist us in loading and unloading tapes when we need to access them."

Courtesy of Google

So all these are involved? I'm confused...never knew google's more than just a search engine. "LEDs indicates everything is runing smooothly"....i wish they were in nigeria, dat light nogo ever on becos of epileptic power supply.

caseless: So all these are involved? I'm confused...never knew google's more than a search engine.

Google is much more than a search engine. But even if it was just a search engine, it would need all these data centers to carry out its functions as the world's premier search engine.

ScienceFiction:

Google is much more than a search engine. But even if it was just a search engine, it would need all these data centers to carry out its functions as the world's premier search engine.

broda, u're right! Thank u...

caseless: broda, u're right! Thank u...

No problem. Google besides Apple is one of the most fascinating tech companies in the world. Their innovative ideas is beneficial for all of humanity.

Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated in Oklahoma. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of the servers

Courtesy of Google

Google's server farm in Douglas County, Iowa

Courtesy of Google

Denise Harwood, a Google Engineer, diagnoses an overheated CPU. For more than a decade, Google has built some of the world's most efficient servers.

Courtesy of Google