Google has thrown open the doors to its datacentres, publishing a whole site dedicated to photos inside the otherwise secretive locations, adding Street View to the centre in Lenoir, NC, and allowing Wired on site for a lengthy tour.
Google’s data centres are impressive for a lot of reasons, chief among them probably being the sheer scale of it all. But this particular detail from Wired’s look inside is pretty high on the list too:
Google realised that the so-called cold aisle in front of the machines could be kept at a relatively balmy 26-degrees celcius or so-workers could wear shorts and T-shirts instead of the standard sweaters. And the “hot aisle,” a tightly enclosed space where the heat pours from the rear of the servers, could be allowed to hit around 48-degrees celcius. That heat could be absorbed by coils filled with water, which would then be pumped out of the building and cooled before being circulated back inside.
Google’s going to be putting up more posts about its arrays of data centres in even more detail, so check out the Google Green Blog for more on that. [Google]
Image Credit: Connie Zhou