Wow – impressive operation!

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech

You could have fun in there with a pai of cable snips 😈

No need for snips just switch some cables around and watch the fun! 👿

All that just to bring my my porn

And they use bikes! A G-Bike!!!

Would be interesting to see a breakdown of what those servers are hosting i.e. 50% porn, 30% business sites, 20% kasese research videos?

I have enough issues trying to sort a reasonable backing-up solution at home….

Tremendous, isn’t it.

I mean, the scale of operation should be fairly obvious if you stop and think about it, but who actually does that? Impressive stuff. I’d love to work in there.

The Belgian one is impressive as well as it doesn’t use refrigeration. If it gets too warm then folks are just sent to work in their offices for a bit and if it gets really hot then they just route the traffic elsewhere in the world for a while. Brilliant

Was talking with a SAN vendor that YouTube use and apparently YouTube have a team of people on Segways whose sole job is just to zoom around the vast main datacenter swapping out failed disks. Despite them being enterprise class drives they get a failure every 10 minutes just due to the sheer number of drives in use…

I’ve done a few HVAC installs in datacentres and never seen anything as impressive as those data centres. Some of our clients in the UK remove light fittings just so they don’t overload the power supply to the datacentre!!!

Colour coded pipes, whatever next.

Worked/been in a couple of datacentres and from experience, they’re an absolute mess and they were for two large UK financial organisations.

Just bloody annoying things like cages with doors that didn’t even shut properly and had a habit of swinging open as you shuffled down a stupidly narrow corridor between racks…

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants

Hang on, I thought the internet was gonna save electricity…
(He says, adding his inanane comment into the nukeosphere)

Beware, a lot of the information in the NYTimes article is, well… dubious. Indeed, energy consumption is huge per unit of compute/storage, but steadily decreasing. It’s (obviously) a very active industry, and no one really wants to pay to air condition the heat equivalent of the power consumption of a small town.

Pretty impressive. Never thought it be anything like that just for a search engine.

Im sure I read something once that when they started they just used bog standard PCs networked up together so that when one went pop they could just disconnect it and replace it. They’ve come a long way since then’

I assumed all data farms would be in iceland by now? Power comes out of the ground if you drill a hole, abundant cold water and air, and well placed between the USA & western europe.

That makes me want to be a Pipefitter again, just for a day though.

So the internet is a series of tubes!

I’m impressed they take the effort to keep them neat and nicely colour coded, our (tiny) server room at work is a rats nest…

I assumed all data farms would be in iceland by now? Power comes out of the ground if you drill a hole, abundant cold water and air, and well placed between the USA & western europe.

and bang on top of a fault line with bloody big volcanoes. 🙄

Wonder what percentage of those racks are dealing with porn searches at any one time?

Awesome! I’ve only been in one and it was very impressive, but that knocks it into a cocked hat!

We did get the environmental blurb on our visit. I think they said that the air-con was only on for about 38 days in 2011 because they directed the airflow, and monitored it on the ‘inlet’ and ‘outlet’ of each cabinet. They also used massive ‘car radiators’ as heat exchange units and used solar power to run the water/oil pumps

No herds of deer in the car park though (love that photo!)

Late Edit – Ref Iceland comment; Scotland used to be popular for data centers, but because of problems getting services (including fuel during the winter) to them and the increased efficiency they are moving South

BMW Shifts Supercomputing To Iceland To Save Emissions

Wonder what percentage of those racks are dealing with porn searches at any one time?

Probably a scarily high %age!

Someone told me that our datacentre is the biggest in Europe. I think they are lying, but then again – I don’t really know what a datacentre does.

The mind boggles at the cost of all that! (I work for a storage/infrastructure distributor, so have a bit of insight)

The huge one we use has auto lights so you are lit up and the multi acres all around you are dark.

Just you, the blinking lights, and the zombies hiding in the darkness.

Back when Sun Microsystems owned the internet, I did some work for the ‘Sun Grid’ project, so all this Google stuff looks pretty ordinary to me.

Sun didn’t bother painting their air-conditioning pipes to brand guidelines though, perhaps that’s where they went wrong.

The huge one we use has auto lights so you are lit up and the multi acres all around you are dark.

Our boring warehouse full of old fashions physical stock has that. Whoop!

Check this out http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/

Don’t just look at the pics take a walk round

Where can I buy a G Bike?

In ten years it’ll fit in my shed.
No it won’t it’ll be full of bikes.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=avP5d16wEp0[/video]

Wow – impressive operation!

What they don’t show you in those photos, is that it’s all plugged in to this..

Forget the geeky stuff, did no one else spot this character in the Lenoir site?

Yes, and if you look carefully it’s characters not character – R2D2 is next to him

Forget the geeky stuff

😕

You just posted a picture of a storm trooper that you found while browsing a server farm on Streetview. I think that is the definition of geeky!