YouTube tour reveals Google data center designs
Want to peek inside Google's formerly uber-secret data centers? The company has published its tour on YouTube.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Judging by the heavy interest in last week's look at Google's previously secret server and data center design, I thought it would be useful to note that Google has now put much of the information on YouTube.
The disclosures came at a Google-sponsored conference on data center efficiency, which boils down to getting the most computing done with the least electrical power. The idea is core to Google's operations: the company operates at tremendous scale, tries to minimize its harm to the environment, and has a strong financial incentive to keep its costs low.
There are a number of videos from the conference online, starting with the tour of a Google data center. Google's servers, which the company itself designs, are packed 1,160 at a time into shipping containers that form a basic, modular unit of computing.
Also worth a look is the tour of Google's water treatment facility. Google uses water to cool the hot air the servers produce. Most Google data centers use chillers to cool the water by refrigeration, but one data center in Belgium is experimenting with the use only of the less power-hungry evaporative cooling.
Finally, Google published the proceedings of the conference itself--part one, part two, and part three.
Below are the videos themselves.
(Via Google Blogoscoped.)