a data center's the brains of the
internet the engine of the internet it
is a giant building with a lot of power
a lot of cooling and a lot of computers
it's row upon row upon row of machines
all working together to provide the
services that make google function
i love building and operating data
centers i'm joe cava vice president of
data centers at google i'm responsible
for managing the teams globally that
design build and operate google's data
centers we're also responsible for the
environmental health and safety
sustainability and carbon offsets for
our data centers
this data center here in in south
carolina is one node in a larger network
of data centers all over the world of
all the employees at google a very very
small percentage of those employees are
authorized to even enter a data center
campus the men and women that run these
data centers and keep them up 24 hours a
day seven days a week they are
incredibly passionate about what they're
doing
in layman's terms what do i do here
i typically refer to myself as the
herder of cats and i'm an engineer
hardware site operations manager we keep
the lights on and we enjoy doing it and
they work very hard so we like to
provide them a fun environment where
they can also play hard as well
we just
went past the three million man hour
mark for zero loss time incidents three
million man hours is a really long time
and with the number of people that we
have on site that is an amazing
accomplishment
i think the google data centers really
can offer a level of security that
almost no other company can match we
have a information security team that is
truly second to none you have the
expression they wrote the book on that
well there are many of our information
security team members that have really
written the books on
best practices in information security
protecting the security and the privacy
of our users information is our foremost
design criteria we use various layers of
higher level security the closer into
the center of the campus you get so just
to enter this campus my badge had to be
on a pre-authorized access list then to
come into the building that was another
level of security to get into the secure
corridor which leads to the data center
that's a higher level of security and
the data center and the networking rooms
are the highest level of security and
the technologies we use are different
like for instance in our highest level
areas we even use underfloor intrusion
detection via laser beams so i'm going
to demonstrate going into the secure
corridor now one i have to be on the
authorized list with my badge and then
two i use a biometric iris scanner to
verify that it truly is me
okay here we are on the data center
floor the first thing that i notice is
that it's a little warm in here it's
about 80 degrees fahrenheit google runs
our data centers warmer than most
because it helps with the efficiency
you'll notice that we have overhead
power distribution coming from the
outside yard we bring in the high
voltage power distribute across the bus
bars to all of the customized bus taps
that are basically plugged where we plug
in all the extension cords
all of our racks don't really look like
a traditional server rack these are
custom designed and built for google so
that we can optimize the servers for
hyper efficiency and high performance
computing it's true that sometimes
drives fail and we have to replace them
to upgrade them because maybe they're
just no longer efficient to run we have
a very thorough end-to-end chain of
custody process for managing those
drives from the time that they're
checked out to the server until they're
brought to an ultra secure cage where
they're erased and crushed if necessary
so any drive that can't be verified is
100 clean we crush it first and then we
take it to an industrial wood chipper
where it's shredded into these little
pieces like this in the time that i've
been at google for almost six and a half
years now we have changed our cooling
technologies at least five times
most data centers have air conditioning
units along the perimeter walls that
force cold air under the floor that then
raises up in front of the servers and
cools the servers in our solution we
take the server racks and we put it
right up against our air conditioning
unit we just use cool water flowing
through those copper coils that you see
there so the hot air from the servers is
contained in that hot aisle it raises up
passes across those coils where the heat
from the air transfers to the water in
those coils and then that warm water is
then brought outside the data center to
our cooling plant where it is cooled
down through our cooling towers and
returned back to the data center and
that process just repeats over and over
again
[Music]
to me the thing that amazes me about
google in the data centers is the pace
of innovation and always challenging the
way we're doing things
so when people say that innovation in a
certain area is done that we've kind of
reached the pinnacle of what can be
achieved
i just laugh
[Music]
bye