

Google Data centers - blearyeyed
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery

======
alphakappa
These are beautiful pictures, but it was hard to navigate. 'Go Inside' for
example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that
I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning. Having a button in the middle of
these images was also weird (as is having to click something just to see what
the images are about. There's plenty of screen real-estate to show the image
caption). Also strange is that the captions were cut off in the middle of some
not-so-long sentences. Another click to show the remainder of a sentence.

I'm sure this looked very pretty as a design, but the usability is poor.

~~~
seagrass

      'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning.
    

Complaining for the sake of complaining? When you hover over "Go Inside" it
says "View all photos," so isn't that its exact intention? Plus what are you
talking about "missed the thumbnails"?

~~~
alphakappa
>> Complaining for the sake of complaining?

No.

>> When you hover over "Go Inside" it says "View all photos," so isn't that
its exact intention?

I'm not sure I even realized what happens when you hover over it. I clicked it
and it scrolled past a bunch of thumbnails, showed me a spinner for a while,
and then showed me an image. It didn't give me the feeling that I was seeing
the first image in the thumbnail list (Maybe it was, but giving proper context
is important). To provide context, expand the image in place, or show a
lightbox, or show the large image with some thumbnails so I still know that
I'm looking at the first image.

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nemesisj
Heh - one of those data centers (Lenoir) was the focus of quite a bit of
optimism in the Piedmont area of North Carolina a few years ago. I can't find
the news articles, but essentially, massive tax benefits were provided to
Google and they built their data center and proceeded to hire like 4 people,
b/c, you know, it's not a factory. This was apparently a surprise to everyone
who thought a new googleplex was somehow in the works (or maybe this was just
wishful thinking). I'm not really sure what the moral of the story is because
there are probably hundreds of similar backwater towns in the USA that would
line up to offer the same benefits.

~~~
mikeyouse
$212 million in incentives for a three-hundred-billion dollar company, ugh.

[http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-
cost...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-cost-of-
wooing-google)

~~~
aray
(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a
_huge_ textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been
losing ground to overseas manufacturing.

The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and
water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters
are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much higher
capacities than the community would otherwise. This is worth much more than
any small number of jobs created.

~~~
Arelius
I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the
decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it
to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we
need to be subsidizing it?

~~~
sharkweek
We don't -- but when we don't, another county will

~~~
aray
This is it, dead on.

The problem is not incentivizing just _your_ old textile/paper-processing
county, it's competing with all of the other ones. So at the end of the day
hopefully everyone's done their homework and the community is still making
more money than it was before.

------
ChuckMcM
These pictures don't do the diversity of the infrastructure justice. (perhaps
that is intentional) When I was at Google they had just finished deciding that
'containerized' data centers were not a benefit and had just opened up the
buildings in The Dalles, when I left they had brought up the Netherlands and
their midwest data centers. Besides the different environments (can you use
external air for cooling or not, etc) there have been investigations into
power distribution, heating / cooling schemes, and packaging. I don't think
any two data centers I walked into looked exactly the same inside. I found
that kind of neat.

~~~
hindsightbias
> diversity

Still looks like a sausage fest.

~~~
sargun
Women don't tend to apply to datacenter management jobs much. On top of that,
there hasn't been much outreach to women in this career field. Since the
datacenter management field is a race to the bottom in terms of overheads, I
doubt we'll see much either.

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codfrantic
Most of these pictures have been online for a while, I specifically remember
that this[⊗] one was photoshopped because the machines in the racks left and
right are mirror images of one another...

[⊗][https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/23](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/23)

~~~
rbnio
The family of deer that "moved in" next to the Iowa data center [1] also looks
quite photoshopped...

[1]
[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/2](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/2)

~~~
subigo
Definitely not photoshopped. I see these deer everyday. In fact, there are
quite a few more now.

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msoad
This guy totally wins the monitor setup! I thought I have too many monitors
with 5 monitors on my desk

[http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/people/13](http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/people/13)

------
yogo
The area where meth is cooked looks nice
[http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_2000...](http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_2000/DLS_013.jpg)
:)

~~~
miu9089
How endearing. Are you aware of recent reports in the news?
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-
giants-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-
data)

Please think twice before using a Google service.

~~~
melling
It looks like he has been on HN for 2 years so I would conclude that he has
heard the news, and quit wasting people's time.

~~~
ChrisArchitect
true. yet we have this link of datacenter photos that has been around for like
a year. so old man.

------
bsirkia
Very cool. I think it would have been better to have the name of the
tech//person/place on the thumbnail on hover, I would like just be able to
hover across all the thumbnails and see some info about each one.

------
oshineye
Too bad they never show the interesting stuff.

Modern clusters use a new fabric type called Jupiter, built with the Trident+
chips made by Broadcom, that can grow up to ten times bigger then the old
Watchtower clusters (up to 150k servers per fabric)

Old racks have been replaced by the Ikea enclosures that provide DC at the
rack level.

The new machines are also really powerful in terms of cpu power and I/O (flash
storage, 20Gbit network) and are significantly faster then the previous
generation. The public pictures presented in the past are of really old
designs that are not longer in service.

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equalarrow
Ah, so _that 's_ where the Internet lives..

------
danielcorreia
Some cool wallpapers :)

------
miu9089
Hmm... no mention here of how NSA are granted direct access to Google data.
The website must need updating.

A shiny website can't gloss over Google's close collusion with the NSA as
revealed by The Guardian. Their desperate PR attempts will backfire until they
make public and clear statements to improve their transparency.

~~~
SmileyKeith
What is this odd form of spam?

~~~
miu9089
Mentioning the duplicitous activity of Google in a story about their data
centers is very much on-topic. I heavily suspect you work for Google.

~~~
jrockway
-11 karma points in only 43 minutes of existence. Good work.

~~~
jb007
I don't think this individual cares about points.

