Google Data centers

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

by blearyeyed • 13 years ago

119 55 13 years ago

Some cool wallpapers :)

bsirkia• 13 years ago

Very cool. I think it would have been better to have the name of the tech//person/place on the thumbnail on hover, I would like just be able to hover across all the thumbnails and see some info about each one.

miu90894• 13 years ago

Hmm... no mention here of how NSA are granted direct access to Google data. The website must need updating.

A shiny website can't gloss over Google's close collusion with the NSA as revealed by The Guardian. Their desperate PR attempts will backfire until they make public and clear statements to improve their transparency.

SmileyKeith• 13 years ago

What is this odd form of spam?

miu90894• 13 years ago

Mentioning the duplicitous activity of Google in a story about their data centers is very much on-topic. I heavily suspect you work for Google.

gbin• 13 years ago

hey FUD guy: we had a ton of revelations by Snowden but this is not one of them. I would not stay at Google if I had any evidence the security team had intentionally compromised the security of our users period. And I heard the same thing from a lot of different Googlers. Accusing random people of random actions is very easy but the burden of proof is on your side then. I could say mimicking your reasoning: "Prove me you are not a perfect human imitation impersonated by an alien, prove it ! You see you are an alien in disguise!"

10098• 13 years ago

Scroogled!

yogo• 13 years ago

The area where meth is cooked looks nice http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_2000... :)

miu90894• 13 years ago

How endearing. Are you aware of recent reports in the news? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-...

Please think twice before using a Google service.

melling• 13 years ago

It looks like he has been on HN for 2 years so I would conclude that he has heard the news, and quit wasting people's time.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

I'm reasonably certain everyone on HN is aware of these particular "recent reports in the news".

walshemj2• 13 years ago

Not sure from a H&S issue that the local fire chief would be happy with a diy color coding scheme - there are standards for this sort of thing.

alphakappa2• 13 years ago

These are beautiful pictures, but it was hard to navigate. 'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning. Having a button in the middle of these images was also weird (as is having to click something just to see what the images are about. There's plenty of screen real-estate to show the image caption). Also strange is that the captions were cut off in the middle of some not-so-long sentences. Another click to show the remainder of a sentence.

I'm sure this looked very pretty as a design, but the usability is poor.

seagrass• 13 years ago

  'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning.

Complaining for the sake of complaining? When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention? Plus what are you talking about "missed the thumbnails"?

alphakappa2• 13 years ago

> Complaining for the sake of complaining?

No.

> When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention?

I'm not sure I even realized what happens when you hover over it. I clicked it and it scrolled past a bunch of thumbnails, showed me a spinner for a while, and then showed me an image. It didn't give me the feeling that I was seeing the first image in the thumbnail list (Maybe it was, but giving proper context is important). To provide context, expand the image in place, or show a lightbox, or show the large image with some thumbnails so I still know that I'm looking at the first image.

cahitonur• 13 years ago

Nice to see that I'm not the only one having problems with this page. First I thought I have JavaScript disabled but it was not. I just gave up after a couple minutes struggling and refresh.

I had a very similar feeling when I login to g+. It's loading and loading and loading but I don't get anything in the end. I started to think twice before I click a google link.

txutxu• 13 years ago

To add to your note: and does not work with (not so) old browsers.

jgv• 13 years ago

Biggest usability thing for me is not being able to read the caption when mousing over an arrow. Pretty irritating.

http://cl.ly/image/040Y2k2n0o3P

osxrand• 13 years ago

The arrow navigations don't work for me at all in safari on ios7.

None of the photos would load, only the first, the captions worked no problems tho, and would scroll through them all as they should.

No other browsers on iOS (that I have installed) work either. Pretty poor showing from a company that promotes openness and interoperability.

nemesisj2• 13 years ago

Heh - one of those data centers (Lenoir) was the focus of quite a bit of optimism in the Piedmont area of North Carolina a few years ago. I can't find the news articles, but essentially, massive tax benefits were provided to Google and they built their data center and proceeded to hire like 4 people, b/c, you know, it's not a factory. This was apparently a surprise to everyone who thought a new googleplex was somehow in the works (or maybe this was just wishful thinking). I'm not really sure what the moral of the story is because there are probably hundreds of similar backwater towns in the USA that would line up to offer the same benefits.

mikeyouse• 13 years ago

$212 million in incentives for a three-hundred-billion dollar company, ugh.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-cost...

aray2• 13 years ago

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing.

The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much higher capacities than the community would otherwise. This is worth much more than any small number of jobs created.

deelowe2• 13 years ago

They hired quite a bit more than 4 people and there are positions open currently.

nemesisj2• 13 years ago

The article linked above mentioned one person hired at the time of its writing (2007). Obviously it's six years later now, but even if they hired two hundred, it would still be a staggering investment by the local government ($1 million per job).

Again, I'm not sure what the point here is as US States are not much different from countries in a race to the bottom, other than sooner or later you hit bottom. I mainly just found it amusing as it was a huge deal for Lenoir and now here it is on the front page of HN!

codfrantic2• 13 years ago

Most of these pictures have been online for a while, I specifically remember that this[⊗] one was photoshopped because the machines in the racks left and right are mirror images of one another...

[⊗]https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/23

rbnio• 13 years ago

The family of deer that "moved in" next to the Iowa data center [1] also looks quite photoshopped...

[1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/2

subigo• 13 years ago

Definitely not photoshopped. I see these deer everyday. In fact, there are quite a few more now.

47• 13 years ago

We do a lot of photo shoots for our furniture products. The Photoshop team usually will mirror one side of the sofa with other to make the pictures look symmetrical and nicer. I won't be surprised if the pictures are photoshopped to make them symmetrical to give them a less messy look.

alexkus• 13 years ago

If you look at the photo it's just three sets of racks that have been mirrored to the other side; the ones with the orange lights and red cables. None of the other racks looked mirrored.

coryking• 13 years ago

I have to wonder if they photoshopped that not to make things look symmetrical but to hide some kind of trade secret.

If you look at the picture below, there are blue blankets covering some of the racks. Gotta wonder if under those blankets are something they don't want other companies to know about: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/2

pearjuice• 13 years ago

NSA is really keen on branding all their interfaces and hardware with their proprietary logos.

equalarrow• 13 years ago

Ah, so that's where the Internet lives..

msoad• 13 years ago

This guy totally wins the monitor setup! I thought I have too many monitors with 5 monitors on my desk

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/people/13

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

These pictures don't do the diversity of the infrastructure justice. (perhaps that is intentional) When I was at Google they had just finished deciding that 'containerized' data centers were not a benefit and had just opened up the buildings in The Dalles, when I left they had brought up the Netherlands and their midwest data centers. Besides the different environments (can you use external air for cooling or not, etc) there have been investigations into power distribution, heating / cooling schemes, and packaging. I don't think any two data centers I walked into looked exactly the same inside. I found that kind of neat.

hindsightbias• 13 years ago

diversity

Still looks like a sausage fest.

sargun• 13 years ago

Women don't tend to apply to datacenter management jobs much. On top of that, there hasn't been much outreach to women in this career field. Since the datacenter management field is a race to the bottom in terms of overheads, I doubt we'll see much either.

oshineye• 13 years ago

Too bad they never show the interesting stuff.

Modern clusters use a new fabric type called Jupiter, built with the Trident+ chips made by Broadcom, that can grow up to ten times bigger then the old Watchtower clusters (up to 150k servers per fabric)

Old racks have been replaced by the Ikea enclosures that provide DC at the rack level.

The new machines are also really powerful in terms of cpu power and I/O (flash storage, 20Gbit network) and are significantly faster then the previous generation. The public pictures presented in the past are of really old designs that are not longer in service.

Google Data centers

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