Google, the world's most dominant search engine and most popular website, is used by 48.3 percent of all global Internet users and accounts for 5.3 percent of the total number of global pageviews, yet, very few people had ever seen the actual infrastructure responsible for Google’s omnipotence on the Web. That changed on Wednesday, when the search giant launched a new website featuring photographs and a Street View perspective of Google’s enigmatic data centers.
The best pictures from Google’s data centers can be seen in the photo gallery above.
“Our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard,” wrote Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, on the company’s blog. “Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a victual visit.”
The new website, called “Where The Internet Lives,” features 54 photos from five Google data centers around the world, including centers abroad in Finland and Belgium, as well as US centers in Georgia, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
The only data center accessible via Google’s “Street View” perspective, popularized by Google Maps, is the company’s data center in Lenoir, N.C. There, Google invites global useers to “walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor,” or simply “take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure.”
For those users wishing to learn more about the story behind Google’s data centers, Google also allowed one reporter – Wired’s Steven Levy – to write the full story of Google’s data centers direct from the floor. In his story, Levy describes the thousands of miles of fiber and servers that create “the mother of all clouds.”
“This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day,” Levy wrote. “To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.”
Google currently employs 54,604 workers and made $37.9 billion in revenue in 2011.
Google: "A rare look behind the server aisle. Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of our servers."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Hovering above the floor in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the scale of our data center there begins to take shape. Huge steel beams both support the structure and help distribute power."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Steam rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon. These plumes of water vapor create a quiet mist at dusk."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Plastic curtains hang in a network room inside our Council Bluffs data center. Here we serve up cold air through the floor, and the clear plastic barriers help keep the cold air in while keeping hot air out."Courtesy/GoogleAn emerging technology called LTE Broadcast could revolutionize the way we watch video on mobile devices.
Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "A sunset over Saint Ghislain, Belgium illuminates our water storage tanks and cooling towers."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of our data centers. We paint them bright colors not only because it's fun, but also to designate which one is which. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle's Web services, including YouTube, Search and Gmail, were down for a brief period last Friday. Pictured is the company's Oregon data center.GoogleGoogle: "An overhead view of one of our cooling plants, where seawater from the Gulf of Finland entirely cools the data center there."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "These colorful pipes carry water. Three of our data centers, like this one in Finland, run on 100% unprocessed or greywater. The idea behind this is simple: instead of depending on clean, potable water, we use alternative sources of water and clean it just enough so it can be used for cooling. This water still needs to be processed, but treatment for data center use is much easier than cleaning it for drinking."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "These ethernet switches connect our facilities network. Thanks to them, we are able to communicate with and monitor our main controls for the cooling system in our data center."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Our servers are some of the most efficient in the world. One of the ways we've innovated to make them better is by putting a DC power source (battery) right on the server rack."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Each of our server racks has four switches, connected by a different colored cable. We keep these colors the same throughout our data center so we know which one to replace in case of failure."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "On the server floor, powerful computers handle everything, from billions of searches to hosting YouTube videos to protecting your email against viruses. We've custom-designed these servers to be compact and energy efficient."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "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/GoogleGoogle: "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/GoogleA typical data center run by Google relies upon LEDs to minimize heat.Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "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/GoogleGoogle: "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/GoogleGoogle: "Mike Barham swaps out a motherboard. When server parts break, we first try to repair them. If we can't, we break them up into raw materials (steel, plastic, copper, etc.) and recycle the components."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "This family of deer have moved in next to our Council Bluffs, Iowa center."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "To ensure you have access to your data whenever you need it, we keep each piece of data stored on at least two servers. We store another copy of the most important data on digital tapes."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Google employees work here, keeping the facility up and running 24 hours a day."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "Google employees work here, keeping the facility up and running 24 hours a day."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "The networking room is the first stop on our data center floor. The equipment here routes requests to the servers int he next room. These computers also allow our data centers to communicate with one another globally."Courtesy/GoogleGoogle: "The networking room is the first stop on our data center floor."Courtesy/Google
