Exploring Google’s Data Centers

"The Internet? Is that thing still around?" -Homer J. Simpson. Not only is the internet still around, but it grows exponentially every year. Internet giant Google exemplifies this, growing from a start up in a garage in 1998, to dozens of data centers around the world today. Each data center stores massive amounts of data that make up what we call the internet.

To help give you an idea of how rapidly the internet is expanding, we can take a look at the numbers behind the Google owned website YouTube. Every minute the public uploads 72 hours of video to YouTube. Stretch this out over the course of one day and that is over 100,000 hours of video uploaded; this adds up to 37.8 million hours uploaded every year. You might be asking yourself, "Who has time to watch all these videos?" The general public has more than enough time on their hands, watching over 4 billion hours of video every single month. Keep in mind that all of these videos are uploaded, organized, and streamed from servers in Google's data centers.

YouTube is a behemoth when it comes to internet data usage, and yet it is just one of the undertakings of Google. Google also owns and operates internet services like Blogger, Google Docs and Apps, Google Earth, Android, Google Chrome, Gmail, and their search engine that started it all. The Google search engine alone averaged 7.2 billion page views per day in 2010. This is more page views per day than there are people on this planet--which was 6,973,738,433 in 2011, according to Google.com.

Google's official mission is to make the world's information accessible, yet Google keeps information about itself close to its chest. To be able to efficiently do everything that Google does, they need several data center buildings. Google lists twelve data centers on their official directory, with six in the US, but there is credible speculation that the real number is 2-3 times that.

Why the secrecy? Information is valuable and Google takes remarkable actions to make sure their data is safe and secure. Aside from the possibility of Google keeping the locations of entire warehouses a secret, every data center has a team of security guards, multi-factor identification security tools like iris scans, and they are often located in the middle of nowhere. Every Google data center also has multiple backup generators, and every server has a battery installed that will prevent data loss when the switch is made to auxiliary power. And if all of these precautions were not enough, Google also backs up many of the same files in multiple data centers.

Google takes such extreme measures to keep their data safe, because it is essentially your data. All the data Google compiles is submitted to them from users like yourself, and if you have reason to believe that Google is mishandling your information, then you will stop giving Google your data and stop using Google to access the world's information. But Google does more than harvest data, they are also on the forefront of developing new technology, which is another reason they take such extreme security precautions.

Google does not roll out the same data center design with every new building. As technology changes Google accommodates with a new data center design. One data center location in Dallas Oregon has three 68,680 square foot buildings that are each accompanied by a smaller administrative building. Another data center in Lenoir North Carolina has a 139,797 square foot building with plans in place to expand with a second building that will be 337,008 square feet. Each data center has a small 600 million dollar price tag.

Google is becoming more transparent with its operations. Here is an official tour of one of their data centers in North Carolina.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/

Today, cloud computing is a hot topic. Whenever you hear somebody mention the concept of "storing your data to the cloud," they are talking about keeping your information in a data center similar to the ones Google uses. Small Businesses can't typically afford their own data center, but you can still have the same protections and services for your company's data with cloud services from Computerware. We can be your data center with services like data backup, data recovery in case of a disaster, server virtualization, and much more. Call us at (703) 821-8200 to learn more about how cloud services from Computerware can help with the specific IT needs of your business.