Inside Google's $13 Billion Data Centers

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Google is the worst company there ever was, said no one ever. Google has been a leader in innovation, workplace environment, and recently, more and more world-changing projects. Hey there, and welcome everyone to the channel, your go-to for all things tech news. Today, we are taking you inside Google's $13 billion data centers. Let's boot up. February of 2019 brought the world a great announcement. Google announced that it would be investing and building more data centers all around North America. This venture costs Google $13 billion, $4 billion more than their previous data center projects. It is projected to create thousands of jobs and provide space for offices as well as the data centers. Google is no stranger to the infrastructures and layouts of the data centers. Google is a leader in the development of these data centers through their heightened efficiency practices as well as the global network that they have. Recently, Google has conducted rather extreme measures in order to invest in more data centers as well as continuously searching and preparing for their absolutely massive amounts of data storage requirements that the company will face. These data centers are located all over the world, and they are there serving the internet's needs all day, every day. The amount of information that is being held all comes together to be stored on thousands and thousands of hard drives and servers. With so much information being readily available at Google's call, an extensive and thorough set of security precautions are in place. It is among the most secure facilities on earth. All of this information is all stored on physical devices. It is not simply just floating and wasting away in the cloud. Google has tons of physical hard drives that securely store the information. This makes it quite challenging for the day-to-day workloads for associates. Maintaining those hard drives is a task that a specific team is authorized to conduct. If a problem occurs, the hard drives are serviced and, if need be, recycled or destroyed. And of course, this is Google. They do not simply throw away the hard drive and walk away. If a piece of physical property needs to be thrown away, it goes into a massive shredder that leaves nothing but remnants of the device. This makes it so that absolutely no one can access any data whatsoever. The offices have biometric scanners located throughout the facility. These require dual authentication in order to reach the secured rooms and only allows only one person at a time. The company operates with six dedicated layers of security. Number one, signage and fencing. This is the first piece of security that is easily and visibly noticed. Two, the second is the secured perimeter. With thermal cameras and overlapping fields of view, a person can be tracked anywhere on the facility as well as where they have been. Past and present security capabilities. Number three, the third is building accessibility. In order to enter the building, access has to be authorized. RFID badges, security personnel, and biometric scanning are all used in conjunction with one another as well as checkpoints located throughout the building. Number four, the security operations center is where the cameras are monitored. These work hand-in-hand with the security personnel both on the floors and behind the screens. Number five, the data floor security is set up to only have specific people authorized to have access. This floor's access is limited to technicians and engineers as well as the security detail. This is taken a step further through the integration of the customer having an added security bonus of encrypting their data. This means that even though the engineer or technician may have access to the floor, their data is encrypted with a special key that makes it to where the technician cannot access the customer's information. Number six, last but not least, we have the dedicated hardware destruction protocols and procedures that are in place to offer the most effective form of security. When a hard drive is ready for destruction, it is then passed to the destruction room via a two-way locker. This makes it to where only authorized personnel that are located within the drive shredding room will have access to the drives. Adding to this, the metal detectors are in place to ensure that no property is ever removed. Once on the data center main floor, you will notice the hundreds and thousands of servers and hard drives all neatly secured and placed next to each other. It's an amazing sight to be able to see and realize that this is merely just a single location of servers. Utilizing Borg, Colossus, and other such tools as Spanner, the company manages all of the servers efficiently and quite effectively. A single building is able to support 2,25,000 machines and carry over one petabit per second of bandwidth. This is literally more than is on the internet as a whole. With this type of bandwidth and hardware, the company is able to successfully supply their customers with the quick speeds and services that they desire. In order for all of the servers to securely run all of the information and have each of their systems speak to each other, Google operates under their own private backdoor network called C4. It runs faster than the internet-based network. These are speeds that only trillion-dollar corporations can truly manage to achieve and make it look so effortless. These servers and hardware require a massive amount of energy and power to run. Google's precaution to keep these machines operating is done so by incorporating a coolant plant. The heat that is generated on the serving floor gets pretty intense. All of that heat has to be removed and put through a loop of cooling processes. The heat is transferred from the service floor and sent through a heat exchanger. The condenser water loop takes the water from their cold water storage located below the mechanical equipment room, transfers it to the heat exchangers, which then sends it to the cooling towers that are located on the roof of the building. The cooling systems and hardware all require so much power. However, Google has successfully lowered their power usage year after year. In 2014, Google made it apparent that running these centers should be done in a manner that leads towards success. They were able to develop software that optimized the data centers by predicting and guiding the energy used by the company. In 2013, the company partnered with Duke Energy in order to pilot a better and more efficient type of arrangement that allowed the companies to buy renewable energy directly from the utility. The company poises itself on efficiencies, and it clearly shows. The data centers have been shown to use much less energy than the average data center. Adding to this, the equation would be the renewable energy and carbon offsets that the company produces. This makes it to where the company's carbon footprint is zero. This is a carbon-neutral operation and has been going on since 2007, and it has been so effective that other companies have been incorporating the practices as a standard. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, is determined to make the company completely carbon-free. He states, "We are committed to doing our part. Sustainability has been a core value for us since Larry and Sergey founded Google two decades ago. We were the first major company to become carbon-neutral in 2007. We were the first major company to match our energy use with 100% renewable energy in 2017. We operate the cleanest global cloud in the industry and were the world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. In 2017, the company reached the long-standing goal of purchasing enough renewable energy to match 100% of Google's global electric use. During 2018, the company's purchase of energy from other sources matched the entire annual electricity consumption. Billions and billions of dollars being spent on providing the world with cloud storage, cloud-based services, and doing so, with the most heightened and advanced security measures, shows us that Google is king. We can only imagine the possibilities that the company will provide in the near future. That's all for this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and hit that subscribe button to stay up to date about all things tech.