A Tour Inside A Google Data Center

This video provides and excellent informative tour inside a Google Data Center. Have a look, its nice to see some of the technology that powers the modern internet.

Keys features of the data center design are:

• it’s cool - as in water cooling is used
• it’s container based

There are 45 containers each container holds 1000 racked servers giving a total of 45,000 servers! Thats a heck of a lot of computing power.

The video provides an overview of the main areas withing the site and also shows a Google engineer carrying out a server replacement.

All in all a very impressive facility.

How Many Servers Does Google Use?

Though the numbers are not publicly known, some people estimate that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, with major centers in Mountain View, California; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Herndon, Virginia; Lenoir, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Dublin, Ireland; Saint-Ghislain, Belgium; Zürich, Switzerland; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China;^[1][2] and new facilities constructed in The Dalles, Oregon.^[3] In 2009 Google is planning one of its first sites in the upper midwest to open in Council Bluffs, Iowa, close to abundant wind power resources for fulfilling green energy objectives and proximate to fiber optic communications links.^[4]

When an attempt to connect to Google is made, DNS servers resolve www.google.com to multiple IP addresses, which acts as a first level of load balancing by directing clients to different Google clusters. (When a domain name resolves to multiple IP addresses, typical implementation of clients is to use the first IP address for communication; the order of IP addresses provided by DNS servers for a domain name is typically done using Round Robin policy.) Each Google cluster has thousands of servers, and upon connection to a cluster further load balancing is performed by hardware in the cluster, in order to send the queries to the least loaded web server. This makes Google one of the biggest and most complex content delivery networks.^[5]

Racks are custom-made and contain 40 to 80 servers (20 to 40 1U servers on either side), while new servers are 2U Rackmount systems.^[6] Each rack has a switch. Servers are connected via a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet link to the local switch. Switches are connected to core gigabit switch using one or two gigabit uplinks.

For more details see - The Google Platform

Its worth mentioning that the majority of Google’s Data Cenetrs are based in the US even the ones that serve Europe!

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