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Technology: A Virtual Look at Google's Data Centers
There are 12 Google data centers, eight in operation in the US, Finland and Belgium and four that are under construction in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Chile. Up until now Google has been very secretive about the operations at these facilities. But in an effort to open up, they’ve now given the public a peek at those facilities. There’s a series of photos showing the data center facilities, the technology and the technicians who operate them on a site called Where the Internet Lives, and there’s also a virtual walk through that shows the data centers using Google Street View technology. The pictures are pretty and the walk through is fun, but does the public really learn anything about how Google operates from these?
Google’s blog said that “Very few people have stepped inside Google’s data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we’ve shared many of our designs and best practices, and we’ve been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself.”
Joe Kava, Google’s senior director of data center construction and operations, said told eWeek that the virtual tour was created to “shed some light on the technology and the innovations in a way that doesn’t jeopardize our customers’ information and security.”
But others don’t see it that way. John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project director, told TechNewsWorld that “Putting a data center on Street View is a gimmick. It doesn’t reveal anything meaningful about how Google does business. Google says it wants to organize the world’s information and make it more accessible but, when it comes to its own information and procedures, the company remains a black box.”
