YouTube tour reveals Google data center designs
Judging by the heavy interest in last week's look at Google's previously secret server and data center design, I thought it would be useful to note that Google has now put much of the information on YouTube.
The disclosures came at a Google-sponsored conference on data center efficiency, which boils down to getting the most computing done with the least electrical power. The idea is core to Google's operations: the company operates at tremendous scale, tries to minimize its harm to the environment, and has a strong financial incentive to keep its costs low.
There are a number of videos from the conference online, starting with the tour of a Google data center. Google's servers, which the company itself designs, are packed 1,160 at a time into shipping containers that form a basic, modular unit of computing.
Also worth a look is the tour of Google's water treatment facility. Google uses water to cool the hot air the servers produce. Most Google data centers use chillers to cool the water by refrigeration, but one data center in Belgium is experimenting with the use only of the less power-hungry evaporative cooling.
Finally, Google published the proceedings of the conference itself--part one, part two, and part three.
Below are the videos themselves.
(Via Google Blogoscoped.)
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
http://www.eds.com/news/features/5138/
- by rcockrell April 14, 2009 8:53 AM PDT
- Funny thing about this whole article. On google's website they have been touting existing data centers that run PUE's of 1.12 and this one is only getting 1.25. The lower the number the better.
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(5 Comments)http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/measuring.html
The difference between the older data centers and the new one is that before they were running outside air economizing (no mechanical cooling) and the new one uses water side economizing with chillers. They finally got the clue that they had a very high server failure rate in the existing data centers and that the cost of servers and disposal was eatting up any savings from energy. It also was not sustainable as the rules for e-waste have been changing. No Outside Air Economizing! It's not sustainable!