Inside a Google Data Center

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A data center's the brains of the internet the engine of the internet it is a giant building with a lot of power a lot of cooling and a lot of computers it's row upon row upon row of machines all working together to provide the services that make google function i love building and operating data centers i'm joe cava vice president of data centers at google i'm responsible for managing the teams globally that design build and operate google's data centers we're also responsible for the environmental health and safety sustainability and carbon offsets for our data centers this data center here in in south carolina is one node in a larger network of data centers all over the world of all the employees at google a very very small percentage of those employees are authorized to even enter a data center campus the men and women that run these data centers and keep them up 24 hours a day seven days a week they are incredibly passionate about what they're doing in layman's terms what do i do here i typically refer to myself as the herder of cats and i'm an engineer hardware site operations manager we keep the lights on and we enjoy doing it and they work very hard so we like to provide them a fun environment where they can also play hard as well we just went past the three million man hour mark for zero loss time incidents three million man hours is a really long time and with the number of people that we have on site that is an amazing accomplishment i think the google data centers really can offer a level of security that almost no other company can match we have a information security team that is truly second to none you have the expression they wrote the book on that well there are many of our information security team members that have really written the books on best practices in information security protecting the security and the privacy of our users information is our foremost design criteria we use various layers of higher level security the closer into the center of the campus you get so just to enter this campus my badge had to be on a pre-authorized access list then to come into the building that was another level of security to get into the secure corridor which leads to the data center that's a higher level of security and the data center and the networking rooms are the highest level of security and the technologies we use are different like for instance in our highest level areas we even use underfloor intrusion detection via laser beams so i'm going to demonstrate going into the secure corridor now one i have to be on the authorized list with my badge and then two i use a biometric iris scanner to verify that it truly is me okay here we are on the data center floor the first thing that i notice is that it's a little warm in here it's about 80 degrees fahrenheit google runs our data centers warmer than most because it helps with the efficiency you'll notice that we have overhead power distribution coming from the outside yard we bring in the high voltage power distribute across the bus bars to all of the customized bus taps that are basically plugged where we plug in all the extension cords all of our racks don't really look like a traditional server rack these are custom designed and built for google so that we can optimize the servers for hyper efficiency and high performance computing it's true that sometimes drives fail and we have to replace them to upgrade them because maybe they're just no longer efficient to run we have a very thorough end-to-end chain of custody process for managing those drives from the time that they're checked out to the server until they're brought to an ultra secure cage where they're erased and crushed if necessary so any drive that can't be verified is 100 clean we crush it first and then we take it to an industrial wood chipper where it's shredded into these little pieces like this in the time that i've been at google for almost six and a half years now we have changed our cooling technologies at least five times most data centers have air conditioning units along the perimeter walls that force cold air under the floor that then raises up in front of the servers and cools the servers in our solution we take the server racks and we put it right up against our air conditioning unit we just use cool water flowing through those copper coils that you see there so the hot air from the servers is contained in that hot aisle it raises up passes across those coils where the heat from the air transfers to the water in those coils and then that warm water is then brought outside the data center to our cooling plant where it is cooled down through our cooling towers and returned back to the data center and that process just repeats over and over again [Music] to me the thing that amazes me about google in the data centers is the pace of innovation and always challenging the way we're doing things so when people say that innovation in a certain area is done that we've kind of reached the pinnacle of what can be achieved .