Inside Google Data Centers / Street View
See inside one of Google‘s data centers in this guided tour. See what powers our products, and then explore on your own in Street View.
From our networking room to the cooling towers outside of the facility, you can explore the different areas of a Google data center in this guided video tour. Learn more about what you’re viewing in Street View above, and see some of our equipment in motion.
Check out the gallery, Where the Internet lives
Photos by Connie Zhou
Inside our campus network room, routers and switches allow our data centers to talk to each other. The fiber optic networks connecting our sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling.
Our Council Bluffs data center provides over 115,000 square feet of space. We make the best out of every inch, so you can use services like Search and YouTube in the most efficient way possible.
Plastic curtains hang in a network room inside our Council Bluffs data center. Here we serve up cold air through the floor, and the clear plastic barriers help keep the cold air in while keeping hot air out.
Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of our data centers. We paint them bright colors not only because it’s fun, but also to designate which one is which. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower.
Server floors like these require massive space and efficient power to run the full family of Google products for the world. Here in Hamina, Finland, we chose to renovate an old paper mill to take advantage of the building’s infrastructure as well as its proximity to the Gulf of Finland’s cooling waters.
Blue LEDs on this row of servers tell us everything is running smoothly. We use LEDs because they are energy efficient, long lasting and bright.
This is a closer view of the backup tapes in our tape library. Each tape has a unique barcode so our robotic system can locate the right one.
Each of our server racks has four switches, connected by a different colored cable. We keep these colors the same throughout our data center so we know which one to replace in case of failure.
In case anything should happen to our data, we have it all backed up. One of the places we back up information is here in our tape library. Robotic arms (visible at the end of the aisle) assist us in loading and unloading tapes when we need to access them.
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