The usually secretive Google has a sudden change of heart when it comes to data centres-- with "On Where the Internet Lives," an online gallery providing a tour of the insides of the Google server halls.
"Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit," technical infrastructure VP Urs Hölzle writes on the Google Official Blog.
The extensive photo set, with photography by Connie Zhou, covers not only the Google facilities in the US, but also the server halls (and innovative water cooling systems) in Hamina, Finland and St. Ghislain, Belgium. The pictures reveal not only racks of server equipment, but also brightly coloured piping, a guard or three, yellow Google bicycles (for employees to traverse massive floors) and dramatic vistas outside the halls.
More curious visitors can also tour Google data centres through Street View.
The hardware inside the data centres appears to be a mixture of custom-built designs and more familiar commercial networking equipment.
Google gets plenty of requests for facility tours... requests it usually rejects. However the previously mentioned change of heart (or transparency policy) allowed for a Wired Magazine visit to a data centre at Lenoir, North Carolina.
Amongst other interesting details (the Lenoir facility houses 49923 servers), Wired reveals the Google take on disaster recovery testing (DiRT)-- a simulated attack performed by the Site Reliability Engineering team, with employees in leather jackets attempting to hamper Google operations.
Go Google's Data Centres: An Inside Look
Go Google Throws Open Doors to its Top-Secret Data Centre (Wired)
