No more secrets for Google

For the first time Google released photos of its top secret data centers. On “Where the Internet lives”, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.

"These colorful pipes are responsible for carrying water in and out of our Oregon data center. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled."

"Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of our data centers. We paint them bright colors not only because it's fun, but also to designate which one is which. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower."

"Blue LEDs on this row of servers tell us everything is running smoothly. We use LEDs because they are energy efficient, long lasting and bright."

"Server floors like these require massive space and efficient power to run the full family of Google products for the world. Here in Hamina, Finland, we chose to renovate an old paper mill to take advantage of the building's infrastructure as well as its proximity to the Gulf of Finland's cooling waters."

"This is a closer view of the backup tapes in our tape library. Each tape has a unique barcode so our robotic system can locate the right one."

"Each of our server racks has four switches, connected by a different colored cable. We keep these colors the same throughout our data center so we know which one to replace in case of failure."

"A rare look behind the server aisle. Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of our servers."

"Denise Harwood diagnoses an overheated CPU. For more than a decade, we have built some of the world's most efficient servers."

"Inside our campus network room, routers and switches allow our data centers to talk to each other. The fiber optic networks connecting our sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling."

Too see the full gallery of photos click on this link.