A tour of Google’s top-secret data centers

A tour of Google’s top-secret data centers

Google, which probably owns the largest number of computer servers in the world and a sizable chunk of the internet itself, has finally opened the doors of some its data centers to the curious, prying eyes of outsiders.

Google operates a number of major data centers around the world, mostly in the US and Europe, which act as hubs for its smaller, regional installations. In this case, Google has taken most of the wraps off its Lenoir, North Carolina data center, which has been in operation since 2008. This makes it one of Google’s older data centers, and according to Wired it will soon be obsolete and in need of refitting (which is probably why Google is showing us it). Starting today, you can use Google Street View to walk around the Lenoir data center.

In addition to Lenoir, Google has also provided some utterly beautiful photos of its other data centers. We still have very few details of the actual hardware being used, or the software that knits Google’s infrastructure together, or any raw figures on power usage and efficiency — but hey, stop asking questions and look at the pretty photos!

Water pipes, at Google’s Oregon data center. Blue = cold water, red = hot water. Green/yellow = ???

Google’s Council Bluffs, Iowa data center



More water pipes, this time at Google’s Douglas County, Georgia data center. The green units on the left are refrigeration units.



The same water pipes, but with a bicycle for scale



Pressurized, filtered water to put out any fires in the data center



An overhead view of the Council Bluffs, Iowa data center



Council Bluffs data center: Cold air is pumped up through the floor, and then kept in with the plastic barriers



A bunch of hard drives — Google goes through quite a few, presumably



More pretty water pipes…



Water pipes at Google’s Hamina, Finland data center. Here, sea water is pumped in to cool the servers.



Some servers at the Hamina, Finland Google data center



Lots of servers, at Google’s Douglas County data center. Blue LEDs mean the servers are healthy, apparently



Google’s tape backup system, at its Berkeley County data center



Some very orderly network cables



Racks of servers (and switches at the top), at Google’s Mayes County, Oklahoma data center



A delightful mess of Google-colored cables



And finally, a happy photo of some water storage tanks at Google’s Saint Ghislain data center in Belgium.

• By Sebastian Anthony

Google may design its own ARM chips, could threaten Intel’s server business

Google may design its own ARM chips, could threaten Intel’s server business

Over the past few years, we’ve seen Intel and ARM both take steps towards each other’s core business interests. To date, both companies have met with limited success. Intel’s push into mobile resulted in some decent products but little sales momentum, while various ARM licensees are still working on server-class designs to compete with Intel’s Xeon and Atom-powered products.

According to Bloomberg, Google is considering building its own ARM-based servers, in a move that could open a serious crack in Intel’s data center business. The danger here isn’t financial — it’s structural and political. Even if Google decided it wanted to start rolling out its own ARM chips, it takes time to build a CPU from scratch (or to pay a foundry to fab an ARM standard core to your specifications). Even once you’ve got the core in-hand, the process of migrating over servers and shifting infrastructure is a long, slow job. Server rooms are not generally places of enthusiastic excess and Google would have to migrate a great deal of highly sophisticated software. It’s absolutely doable — but it’s not the kind of thing Google would do on a lark, and it’s not a decision that would bite into Intel’s Q4 revenue.

Intel’s data center pivots

The question of whether a Google ARM project threatens Intel’s business is a complicated one. Pundits who confidently predict the death of x86 due to the same inexorable trends that drove x86 to ascendency into server rooms in the mid 1990s are likely overreaching. When Intel rose to dominate the server market in the 1990s, it wasn’t just because it built cheap processors, but because the Pentium Pro was capable of matching the performance of high-end RISC workstations. Initially shaky software support firmed up over the years as Intel continued to iterate on its own product designs, improved high-end chipset capabilities, and invested in its own x86 compilers and software products.

Critically, Intel didn’t face one unified opponent. IBM had products based on both Power and later, PowerPC. SGI owned MIPS, Sun had Sparc and UltraSparc, HP used PA-RISC, and Digital built Alpha. These chips were built according to RISC principles, but they weren’t cross-compatible. If there had been one unified RISC vendor facing down Intel in the early 1990s, the market might have evolved in an entirely different direction.

Inside a Google server

Intel was able to out-innovate its RISC competitors by offering superior integration and better performance. Could ARM vendors beat out Intel on that front? Maybe — but to date, they haven’t. Intel is a prominent member of Facebook’s Open Compute Project. It’s partnered up with HP to build server cards, just as it pushed into blade servers years ago. The entire Atom product line has prominently transitioned into the server space over the past few years, just as the rumors of ARM servers began to coalesce into real products.

ARM servers from the likes of Calxeda, X-Gene, or or even AMD’s own efforts could grab notable market share, but don’t necessarily threaten the x86 architecture’s dominance of the overall market. A Google-designed chip would be a different matter. Even if the impact to Intel’s balance sheet were small, the impact on the idea of an x86 hegemony could be significant. It’s the sort of rumor that leads to phone calls and high level conversations between executives — and possibly more custom designs for Google’s own data centers.

• By Joel Hruska on December 13, 2013 at 7:23 am