Google Throws Open Doors *Data Center*

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.



Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor, referred to simply as “the floor.” My visit is the latest evidence that Google is relaxing its black-box policy. My hosts include Joe Kava, who’s in charge of building and maintaining Google’s data centers, and his colleague Vitaly Gudanets, who populates the facilities with computers and makes sure they run smoothly.

It wouldn’t be easy. Exodus was “a huge mess,” Hölzle later recalled. And the cramped hodgepodge would soon be strained even more. Google was not only processing millions of queries every week but also stepping up the frequency with which it indexed the web, gathering every bit of online information and putting it into a searchable format. AdWords—the service that invited advertisers to bid for placement alongside search results relevant to their wares—involved computation-heavy processes that were just as demanding as search. Page had also become obsessed with speed, with delivering search results so quickly that it gave the illusion of mind reading, a trick that required even more servers and connections. And the faster Google delivered results, the more popular it became, creating an even greater burden. Meanwhile, the company was adding other applications, including a mail service that would require instant access to many petabytes of storage. Worse yet, the tech downturn that left many data centers underpopulated in the late ’90s was ending, and Google’s future leasing deals would become much more costly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=avP5d16wEp0



For Google to succeed, it would have to build and operate its own data centers—and figure out how to do it more cheaply and efficiently than anyone had before. The mission was codenamed Willpower. Its first built-from-scratch data center was in The Dalles, a city in Oregon near the Columbia River.

 

Google’s breakthroughs extend well beyond energy. Indeed, while Google is still thought of as an Internet company, it has also grown into one of the world’s largest hardware manufacturers, thanks to the fact that it builds much of its own equipment. In 1999, Hölzle bought parts for 2,000 stripped-down “breadboards” from “three guys who had an electronics shop.” By going homebrew and eliminating unneeded components, Google built a batch of servers for about $1,500 apiece, instead of the then-standard $5,000. Hölzle, Page, and a third engineer designed the rigs themselves. “It wasn’t really ‘designed,’” Hölzle says, gesturing with air quotes.

More than a dozen generations of Google servers later, the company now takes a much more sophisticated approach. Google knows exactly what it needs inside its rigorously controlled data centers—speed, power, and good connections—and saves money by not buying unnecessary extras. (No graphics cards, for instance, since these machines never power a screen. And no enclosures, because the motherboards go straight into the racks.) The same principle applies to its networking equipment, some of which Google began building a few years ago.

So far, though, there’s one area where Google hasn’t ventured: designing its own chips. But the company’s VP of platforms, Bart Sano, implies that even that could change. “I’d never say never,” he says. “In fact, I get that question every year. From Larry.”

Even if you reimagine the data center, the advantage won’t mean much if you can’t get all those bits out to customers speedily and reliably. And so Google has launched an attempt to wrap the world in fiber. In the early 2000s, taking advantage of the failure of some telecom operations, it began buying up abandoned fiber-optic networks, paying pennies on the dollar. Now, through acquisition, swaps, and actually laying down thousands of strands, the company has built a mighty empire of glass.

Asked in what areas one might expect change, Hölzle mentions data center and cluster design, speed of deployment, and flexibility. Then he stops short. “This is one thing I can’t talk about,” he says, a smile cracking his bearded visage, “because we’ve spent our own blood, sweat, and tears. I want others to spend their own blood, sweat, and tears making the same discoveries.” Google may be dedicated to providing access to all the world’s data, but some information it’s still keeping to itself.