Take a tour of Google's secretive data centers where all your photos and emails are stored
Google has data centers in 14 different locations, including The Netherlands, Singapore, and Chile. This is the one in Finland.
Data centers basically power all of Google's services, so they need to run 24 hours a day.
At first, they may look just like any other Google office.
But once you get to the back, you'll see racks and racks of servers and computer storage, like this.
These servers handle everything from processing billions of searches and hosting Youtube videos, to protecting your email from virus attacks.
Google says its fiber optic networks run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection.
This is what's behind the server aisle. There are hundreds of fans cooling down the servers. The green lights show the server status.
Google custom designs the servers to be compact and energy efficient.
To make sure users can have quick access to data, Google stores each piece of data on at least two servers.
Google stores another copy of the most important data on digital tapes in a place called the "Tape Library."
This is where the backup tapes are stored. There are robotic arms that can automatically load and unload tapes.
When a backup tape breaks, Google immediately destroys it with a disk-crusher.
Meet Mike Barham, an operations technician at the Dalles, Oregon data center. He's repairing a motherboard here, but when he can't, he breaks them up into raw materials and recycle the components.
This is associate facilities manager Jeff Hajer hard at work in a fabrication area at Google's Lenoir center.
There are some interesting perks too. In this data center in Finland, a conference room is located just outside a sauna area available to all employees.
This is Jon Rogers at the North Carolina data center using what it calls a "floor-tile-grabber" to check the status of the pipes underneath.
Roger Harris works on the infrastructure side of the servers. He says his job "allows Google to do what it does."
This is the control station that monitors the data center. It can take calls from the field and validate repair tickets.
The data center in South Carolina has this water tank that can hold up to 240,000 gallons of water, which is used to cool data centers.
These colorful pipes are used to send water to cool the data centers. That's a G-Bike employees use to move around data centers.
Here's steam shooting out of The Dalles data center in Oregon as it's cooling down.
It actually creates quite a scene.
To save water, Google is experimenting with this rainwater retention pond in its South Caroline data center.
This is the data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It's pretty easy to spot groups of deer around it.
This massive antenna sends and receives signals to bring fiber optics to residential homes around the world. It's also the primary signal source of Google Fiber's TV service.
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