Google Opens Data Centre Doors: Gallery

On Wednesday, Google finally showed the world what the insides of its data centres look like.

While the company has been sharing its infrastructure designs and efficiency data for years, the server farms themselves were previously off-limits, due to security concerns.

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In an interview with eWEEK, Joe Kava, Google’s senior director of data centre construction and operations, said that the virtual tour was created to “shed some light on the technology and the innovations in a way that doesn’t jeopardise our customers’ information and security.”

To capture the alien sights of Google’s facilities in the US and Europe, the company has called in the New York artist Connie Zhou, who has previously worked for design and architecture companies.

The gallery features eight out of nine Google data centres around the world. In the US, the servers supporting the company’s products are located in Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, Georgia and Oklahoma. In Europe, it’s St Ghislain in Belgium and Hamina in Finland.

You can find more background information on Google’s data centres in another TechWeekEurope story.

You can even take a virtual tour of the North Carolina data centre in Google StreetView, featuring everything from the networking room and staff kitchen to the cooling towers outside.

The tour gives you an idea of how important security is for the Google empire:

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