Inside the internet: Google allows first ever look at the eight vast data centers

The Daily UK ^ | 17 October 2012 | Mark Prigg

[jwsea55]

* Data centres range from vast warehouses in Iowa to a converted paper mill in Finland
* Buildings are so large Google even provides bicycles for engineers to get around them
* Street View tour of North Carolina facility reveals Stormtrooper standing guard

Google has given a rare glimpse inside the vast data centres around the globe that power its services.

They reveal an intricate maze of computers that process Internet search requests, show YouTube video clips and distribute email for millions of people.

With hundreds of thousands of servers, colourful cables and even bicycles so engineers can get around quickly, they range from a converted paper mill in Finland to custom made server farms in Iowa.

[jwsea55]

Did a good job with this article. If you have never heard about a data center, the article is definitely worth the read.

[Ken522]

Google has done quite well in delivering information to ... everyone! Imagine a government doing something like this ...

[contrarian]

This is my home town... Haven’t seen any storm troopers wandering around the site.. really impressive retaining wall that must be about 70 feet tall running around the south eastern side of the property that goes for about 1/4 mile

[Albion Wilde]

Of interest? Enormous server farm pix at link.

[jwsea55]

Google has done quite well in delivering information to ... everyone! Imagine a government doing something like this ...

Not just delivering info but also extremely good at collecting it and connecting the dots.

Their search/indexing/quering algorithms are incredible. God help those like FBers who post everything on themselves.

[Standing Wolf]

I don’t do business with companies that practice anti-Second Amendment bigotry.

[Ronald_Magnus]

“The exterior of a Dulles, Oregon server farm”

Sloppy reporting. That should be The Dalles, Oregon.

[jwsea55]

You are in Iowa?

[contrarian]

No Lenoir, N.C. article says street view of N.C. facility

[jwsea55]

I don’t do business with companies that practice anti-Second Amendment bigotry.

Google's alogrithms are pretty much leaps and bounds above anything out there, though.
Have you checked out Ixquick?

[jwsea55]

thanks.

[Vince Ferrer]

How things have changed. It used to be that computers were huge, filling up whole rooms. All the information that existed in digital form in the world could could fit on those.

[Revolting cat!]

What’s changed is not the huge rooms, it’s the computers. Once they were huge and there was one of them, now they’re small, PCs really and there are many, thousands of them. Progress? I don’t think so. I’d take one DEC Alpha, or say a five Alpha cluster over 100 PCs!

[jwsea55]

It blows my mind at what people were doing back in the 60s with the available technology. Can't remember the memory/storage restrictions for the original ticket for what is now Cubic's Transportation system when it was first developed but it was ridiculously small. They eventually had to include security in this restricted constraint.

Now most of programming is just bloatware. Hardly an elegance or succinctness.

[SC_Pete]

Advertising where your datacenters are is not wise.

[Hardraade]

Lol. First dadacenter I visited filled a vast hall in a large manufacturing plant, was so noisy that the had a giant concert band blaster they rolled around with the operators (8 feet tall) and had all of 16K memory :).

[Scutter]

Google's alogrithms are pretty much leaps and bounds above anything out there, though.

Not true; Bing routinely beats Google in search relevance. They beat us sometimes too, but lately we've been beating them more.

[Revolting cat!]

Now most of programming is just bloatware. Hardly an elegance or succinctness.

Precisely. I remember when I was learning perl. I had a mentor, whom I have since come to consider the best perl programmer I have ever met or known about. He used a word to describe some programming solutions, a description it took me a while to understand, but I have since applied it to other things, like... rock music and art photography. I've no idea if this word is common in the programming or perl or in engineering community in general. The word was (is) GASP! nothing more than "interesting"!

He'd describe my early efforts as "not interesting", and later solutions as "interesting". I never dared to ask him what he meant, but in time I learned to understand it on my own, and appreciate interesting things in programming.

[jwsea55]

Advertising where your datacenters are is not wise.

The problem is they are so hard to hide because of their power needs. If I recall correctly, these data centers consume 3% of the country's total power consumption (most it related to cooling...for every watt used to run a data center 2.5 is used to cool it). They like lots of cheap, plentiful and reliable power. (Hydro dominated power sources are preferred locations.) That limits site choices.

[central_va]

For good or bad, porn drove the early internet technology.