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Google Data centers

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119 pointsblearyeyed55 comments

These are beautiful pictures, but it was hard to navigate. 'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning. Having a button in the middle of these images was also weird (as is having to click something just to see what the images are about. There's plenty of screen real-estate to show the image caption). Also strange is that the captions were cut off in the middle of some not-so-long sentences. Another click to show the remainder of a sentence.

I'm sure this looked very pretty as a design, but the usability is poor.

  'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning.

Complaining for the sake of complaining? When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention? Plus what are you talking about "missed the thumbnails"?

>> Complaining for the sake of complaining?

No.

>> When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention?

I'm not sure I even realized what happens when you hover over it. I clicked it and it scrolled past a bunch of thumbnails, showed me a spinner for a while, and then showed me an image. It didn't give me the feeling that I was seeing the first image in the thumbnail list (Maybe it was, but giving proper context is important). To provide context, expand the image in place, or show a lightbox, or show the large image with some thumbnails so I still know that I'm looking at the first image.

Nice to see that I'm not the only one having problems with this page. First I thought I have JavaScript disabled but it was not. I just gave up after a couple minutes struggling and refresh.

I had a very similar feeling when I login to g+. It's loading and loading and loading but I don't get anything in the end. I started to think twice before I click a google link.

To add to your note: and does not work with (not so) old browsers.

Biggest usability thing for me is not being able to read the caption when mousing over an arrow. Pretty irritating.

http://cl.ly/image/040Y2k2n0o3P

The arrow navigations don't work for me at all in safari on ios7.

None of the photos would load, only the first, the captions worked no problems tho, and would scroll through them all as they should.

No other browsers on iOS (that I have installed) work either. Pretty poor showing from a company that promotes openness and interoperability.

Heh - one of those data centers (Lenoir) was the focus of quite a bit of optimism in the Piedmont area of North Carolina a few years ago. I can't find the news articles, but essentially, massive tax benefits were provided to Google and they built their data center and proceeded to hire like 4 people, b/c, you know, it's not a factory. This was apparently a surprise to everyone who thought a new googleplex was somehow in the works (or maybe this was just wishful thinking). I'm not really sure what the moral of the story is because there are probably hundreds of similar backwater towns in the USA that would line up to offer the same benefits.

$212 million in incentives for a three-hundred-billion dollar company, ugh.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-cost...

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing.

The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much higher capacities than the community would otherwise. This is worth much more than any small number of jobs created.

This actually makes a lot of sense to me (someone from an urban area). I never understood why all these towns in the middle of nowhere USA would offer such generous subsidies but this line of reasoning perfectly justifies it. I suspect the cost to decommission or "right-size" these sorts of facilities would probably cost... on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

We don't -- but when we don't, another county will

This is it, dead on.

The problem is not incentivizing just your old textile/paper-processing county, it's competing with all of the other ones. So at the end of the day hopefully everyone's done their homework and the community is still making more money than it was before.

Quite right, and lot's of places don't. You can ask them how many Datacenters they have.

Seriosuly though, you're right, if nobody offered subsidies, they would all be on a level playing field and market forces would win out. However, it only takes one to break rank and the free market is gone.

They hired quite a bit more than 4 people and there are positions open currently.

The article linked above mentioned one person hired at the time of its writing (2007). Obviously it's six years later now, but even if they hired two hundred, it would still be a staggering investment by the local government ($1 million per job).

Again, I'm not sure what the point here is as US States are not much different from countries in a race to the bottom, other than sooner or later you hit bottom. I mainly just found it amusing as it was a huge deal for Lenoir and now here it is on the front page of HN!

Yeah I remember doing a back of the envelope calculation and for Google style DC's you could get away with 20-30 FTE plus a small security team (from someone like group 4) to man the gates patrol the site.

I think at least some Google DC's have a small office block on site possibly for adwords employees.

It's not clear how much of that money is actual investment and how much of it is taxes forgone that they wouldn't have gotten anyway had Google not chosen to locate there. I think it gives a slightly skewed view to call the whole amount an "investment."

Disclaimer: Googler, commenting as private person, not as company rep, etc.

You have to consider more than just the employees that Google hired. They're also spending money in the region on a bunch of things besides salaries. One way to look at might be that if the facility remains open for 10 years, then that $1M/employee pays for salaries, and then they get all of the other economic benefits for "free". It sure sounds like a lot of money, but I wouldn't be surprised if it makes sense in some way. Especially since, as the sibling post points out, there would have been a large number of governments competing for it.

Depends on the contract the company makes with the local municipality. Our local small town got a WalMart distribution center. The town went bankrupt providing free water, roads and electricity to a building that brought in zero jobs and extra business.

Consider: big companies have expert negotiators. Cities have volunteers.

It's much more than that. Any estimate I've seen regarding staffing has always been way off. I can't give specifics, but trust me, it's no where near 4 people even if we exclude contractors and facility support staff.

Employees mean parking spaces. Let's look at the facility using Google's super satellite photos.

I see eight by the guardhouse, one occupied; a further 20 by one data centre, 8 occupied; and a final 23 near another data centre, 6 occupied. Totals: 53 spaces, 15 occupied.

I don't see any bicycle parking or signs of indoor or underground car parks, and there are no sidewalks or bus stops nearby that I can see. This is the middle of the day - I doubt the night shift is any busier.

My money's on 15-30 employees on the day shift, plus a night shift for an additional 4-8 employees depending on shift patterns. So 19-39 total employees. If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how those employees are getting to work :)

These pictures don't do the diversity of the infrastructure justice. (perhaps that is intentional) When I was at Google they had just finished deciding that 'containerized' data centers were not a benefit and had just opened up the buildings in The Dalles, when I left they had brought up the Netherlands and their midwest data centers. Besides the different environments (can you use external air for cooling or not, etc) there have been investigations into power distribution, heating / cooling schemes, and packaging. I don't think any two data centers I walked into looked exactly the same inside. I found that kind of neat.

> diversity

Still looks like a sausage fest.

Women don't tend to apply to datacenter management jobs much. On top of that, there hasn't been much outreach to women in this career field. Since the datacenter management field is a race to the bottom in terms of overheads, I doubt we'll see much either.

Most of these pictures have been online for a while, I specifically remember that this[⊗] one was photoshopped because the machines in the racks left and right are mirror images of one another...

[⊗]https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/23

The family of deer that "moved in" next to the Iowa data center [1] also looks quite photoshopped...

[1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/2

Definitely not photoshopped. I see these deer everyday. In fact, there are quite a few more now.

We do a lot of photo shoots for our furniture products. The Photoshop team usually will mirror one side of the sofa with other to make the pictures look symmetrical and nicer. I won't be surprised if the pictures are photoshopped to make them symmetrical to give them a less messy look.

If you look at the photo it's just three sets of racks that have been mirrored to the other side; the ones with the orange lights and red cables. None of the other racks looked mirrored.

Now that you mention it I remember that the mirroring was done to hide a gap in the racks on the right!

I have to wonder if they photoshopped that not to make things look symmetrical but to hide some kind of trade secret.

If you look at the picture below, there are blue blankets covering some of the racks. Gotta wonder if under those blankets are something they don't want other companies to know about: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/2

NSA is really keen on branding all their interfaces and hardware with their proprietary logos.

This guy totally wins the monitor setup! I thought I have too many monitors with 5 monitors on my desk

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/people/13

The area where meth is cooked looks nice http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_2000... :)

How endearing. Are you aware of recent reports in the news? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-...

Please think twice before using a Google service.

It looks like he has been on HN for 2 years so I would conclude that he has heard the news, and quit wasting people's time.

true. yet we have this link of datacenter photos that has been around for like a year. so old man.

I'm reasonably certain everyone on HN is aware of these particular "recent reports in the news".

You'd be surprised. Recently posters on HN have commented that Google weren't involved with the NSA (using denial quotes from Google staff, as though they carry any weight), and that the NSA only had access via the fiber itself.

Some here seem unaware of the direct access Google provided to their systems.

Sounds like you haven't been reading the news you're encouraging others to look at. Google's willing cooperation appears to be limited to what was known already - national security letters and the like. Those are problematic on Fourth Amendment grounds, but we've known for about a decade about them.

Google seem pretty peeved over stuff like the taps.

Not sure from a H&S issue that the local fire chief would be happy with a diy color coding scheme - there are standards for this sort of thing.

Very cool. I think it would have been better to have the name of the tech//person/place on the thumbnail on hover, I would like just be able to hover across all the thumbnails and see some info about each one.

Too bad they never show the interesting stuff.

Modern clusters use a new fabric type called Jupiter, built with the Trident+ chips made by Broadcom, that can grow up to ten times bigger then the old Watchtower clusters (up to 150k servers per fabric)

Old racks have been replaced by the Ikea enclosures that provide DC at the rack level.

The new machines are also really powerful in terms of cpu power and I/O (flash storage, 20Gbit network) and are significantly faster then the previous generation. The public pictures presented in the past are of really old designs that are not longer in service.

Ah, so that's where the Internet lives..

Some cool wallpapers :)

Hmm... no mention here of how NSA are granted direct access to Google data. The website must need updating.

A shiny website can't gloss over Google's close collusion with the NSA as revealed by The Guardian. Their desperate PR attempts will backfire until they make public and clear statements to improve their transparency.

What is this odd form of spam?

Mentioning the duplicitous activity of Google in a story about their data centers is very much on-topic. I heavily suspect you work for Google.

-11 karma points in only 43 minutes of existence. Good work.

I don't think this individual cares about points.

And I heavily suspect you work for Microsoft.

hey FUD guy: we had a ton of revelations by Snowden but this is not one of them. I would not stay at Google if I had any evidence the security team had intentionally compromised the security of our users period. And I heard the same thing from a lot of different Googlers. Accusing random people of random actions is very easy but the burden of proof is on your side then. I could say mimicking your reasoning: "Prove me you are not a perfect human imitation impersonated by an alien, prove it ! You see you are an alien in disguise!"

Scroogled!

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