It's likely you haven't seen a datacenter from the inside before and certainly not one of Google, but today that changes. Google's datacenters power the company's services like search, Gmail, Youtube and Google Plus. The company now offers us a look inside its massive data center buildings containing thousands of computers. Google has data centers located all over the world for redundancy and speed. The centers consume lots of energy to both power the 24/7 running computers, and to cool heat generated by all those servers.
Google has been in the datacenter business for about 12 years and since then a lot has changed. Google has made progress in energy efficiency, usage of renewable power and the company tries to make their data centers as environmentally friendly as possible.
Here are the photographs Google provides to give us a look inside their datacenters.
The thousands of servers are put in racks, cables all have a different color to easily identify a cable by purpose.
Google shreds all faulty storage devices on site, to prevent the data to be taken elsewhere.
Big pipes of (cooling) water goes through the centers to get rid of all the generated heat. Some pipes will contain highly pressurized water that's cleaned and filtered which can be used to take out a fire.
In a special room all data is backup-ed on tapes where a robot takes care of loading and unloading of tapes when required. Each tap has a barcode to make it easy to identify them.
All the fans running to keep the servers running make a lot of noise!
The datacenters are so large that employees often ride bicycles to get around.
A common practice in data centers is to use raised floors. Below the floor there are power and data cables and are often also used for cooling
There are so many servers stacked on each other that ladders are required to reach the top ones.
Computers still require humans to be in charge. Inside the datacenter people work to monitor the servers, add new ones and change parts when needed.
Credits: Google
