Google has long sought to protect the intellectual property of its innovations, while acknowledging public interest in the cool factor around its massive Internet infrastructure. That effort included industry conferences at the Googleplex in 2009 and in Zurich in 2011 that discussed its technology and best practices, and in 2012 the company published professional photos of its global fleet of data centers. With the launch of Google Cloud Platform, the company has released videos in 2014 and 2016, plus a video of a presentation by Kava at Cloud Next 2019.
What’s interesting from the new video? Keep in mind that Google’s data center design is continuously being updated to integrate new technologies and innovations, as well as refinements in design and operations.
An overhead view shows how Google approaches campus design, with multiple data center buildings with an identical size and shape, providing a repeatable design that can be used to easily add capacity in defined chunks that optimize capital deployment.
Some elements of the mechanical infrastructure are connected or adjacent to the building, with other elements placed slightly further away. This supports an approach in which all of the floor space within the data hall is dedicated to housing racks, servers, storage and networking equipment.
There’s very little equipment on the roof on this campus, an approach which limits the number of roof penetrations for cabling or piping, which can create the potential for leaks during rainy periods. Google is known to use rooftop equipment in markets with limited availability of real estate, such as Singapore, where the company builds multi-story data centers.
