These things burn a lot of energy, and a lot of the energy in a data center is done to cool it down so the computers don't melt. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the centers don't have an environmental cost. Levy says that the specific technology varies from center to center and that Google has considered the local resources and geography in each design. This is a dramatic departure from traditional centers, which use large amounts of energy on air conditioning. The trick to keeping the heat under control, Levy writes, is a "hot aisle," a space that harnesses hot air from the servers into water-filled coils, sends it out of the building to cool, and then circulates it back inside. When I walked into Lenoir I think it was 77 degrees." Google felt that you could run the general facility somewhat warmer than even normal room temperature. "In old data centers, you would put on a sweater before you went in there. "One technique that Google really pioneered was keeping things hotter than has been traditionally expected in a data center," Levy says. ![]() Yahoo and Dell, among other companies, have also set up data centers in Quincy.īut Google's data center technology is unique, Levy says, which is partly responsible for the company's success - and a cause for the secrecy surrounding it. In 2006, Microsoft built a giant data center on 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy, Wash. Google is not the only company with massive computer networks. The total worldwide number eludes even Google's executives, but there have been at least 1 million cumulatively, according to a plaque Levy found on the premises. Google has a lot of servers - Levy reports 49,923 in Lenoir alone. And you're in the throbbing heart of the Internet. And wall to wall are racks and racks and racks of servers with blinking blue lights and each one is many, many times more powerful and with more capacity than my laptop. The room is so huge you can almost see the curvature of Earth on the end. "What strikes you immediately is the scale of things. In an interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, Levy described going where no Google outsider has gone before: It's the same facility the company revealed in an exclusive tour to Wired senior writer Steven Levy, whose story on Google's infrastructure appears in the magazine's November issue. ![]() This is the first time Google has opened the doors of its data centers to outsiders. Hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. A rare look behind the server aisle in Mayes County, Okla.
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