Google Tours Its Data Centers as part of the Cloud Battle

Google's Joe Kava presented at its Cloud Event.  Go to the 5 min mark in the below video.

Open a Chrome or Firefox browser and you can take this DC 360 degree tour.

Wouldn't it be great if Amazon and Microsoft responded in a similar way?

If you don't like watching videos there are a few news articles that report on the above.


Google finally told its most important cloud customers what they wanted to hear
Business Insider - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
In fact, Kava claims that Google is the "world's largest private investor in renewable energy," with $2 billion given to wind and solar companies, as it tries to reduce its power consumption as much as it can. That's a cost savings that gets passed on ...

Google Cloud Platform's 3 keys to the roadmap: Data center, security, containers
TechRepublic - ‎22 hours ago‎
Joe Kava, one of the heads of Google's data center efforts, was the speaker who explained the company's strategy in the data center. Early on, there was a big push in the concept of "your data centers are Google's data centers," likely to position the ...
Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers


ZDNet - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
DeMichillie then introduced data center head Joe Kava, who walked through Google's data center strategy. According to Kava, the core principles of Google's approach to data centers are availability, security, and performance. Kava explained the company ...

So is 48V DC a big deal for the Data Center? Google's OCP contribution

Google's Urs Hoelzle announcing the contribution of 48V and rack design at OCP summit was the news of the Summit.

Google's contribution is posted here.

Why is 48V a big deal? if you are pushing higher performing chips as Google's Urs Hoelzle has discussed in his paper on the need for brawny cores vs. wimpy cores.  There is a need for GPUs as mentioned in the post.

As the industry's working to solve these same problems and dealing with higher-power workloads, such as GPUs for machine learning, it makes sense to standardize this new design by working with OCP. We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google.

Why would Google contribute the 48V DC design?  As one ex-Googler said at OCP Google wants to reduce the cost of the 48V DC converters and to do that they need more volume.  And Google has a history of sharing its innovations.  See the below timeline on Google's contributions

Where is Google's Next Data Center presence in Africa after Kenya?

I've been waiting for when there would be some news worth writing about Africa.  It's been at least 3 years when I told some of my clients to think about Africa for data center development.  With Google's Renewable Energy investment in Kenya covered in Wired there is finally some news from one of the big data center players.

“GOOGLE IS BACKING Africa’s largest wind power project, two years after investing $12 million in the continent’s largest solar power project.

This morning, at a conference in Washington, D.C., the tech giant announced its support for the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project in northern Kenya, a project that could provide enough clean energy to power 2 million homes, representing about 15 percent of the capacity of the country’s power grid. The average wind speed at Lake Turkana is almost 25 mph, according to Google.

The move is Google’s 22nd investment in clean energy infrastructure, spanning a total of 2.5 gigawatts of power and more than $2 billion. Most of the company’s investment has been in the US, but Rick Needham, a Google director of energy and sustainability, says the company wants to promote clean energy in the developing world. “The fastest growing economies are here, and there’s a strong need for critical power,” he says of places like Kenya. “Economies are being held back because they don’t have enough power—and yet they have wonderful renewable resources. These nations can meet their future and growing energy needs by tapping into some of the best renewable resources in the world.””

When you look at a submarine cable you can see how Africa is a key position and there is an emerging market.

Google has made an investment in renewable energy which in all probability means a data center presence in Kenya, but to cover Africa with only one data center location does not make any sense. 

Where is Google's next data center location in Africa? 


Google will expand Georgia data center 808,355 sq ft by end of 2016

Atlanta Business Chronicle reports on the size of Google's data center expansion.  The article proudly says they have an update on the size, but my friends who work on data centers would want to know how much power.

I would guess 600,000 sq ft is white space multiple by 125 watts/sq ft and you get 75MW. That seems about right for a Google project.

“Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) said last month it will invest in a $300 million expansion of its Lithia Springs, Ga., data center. The company, however, did not disclose details about the size of the expansion.
A public filing on July 9 revealed Google’s plans to build a mammoth 808,355-square-foot data center at the site. The expansion will include a four-story data center and auxillary structures.”