Google's data centers are the object of great fascination, and the intrigue about these facilities is only deepened by Google's secrecy about its operations.
What's a data center?
A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of computers that store and serve vast amounts of data. Most companies have, or use, some kind of data center. For Google, data centers are especially important.
Super-sized storage space
What Google does is not so different from what the human brain does, processing and storing ideas, words, images and all the context that weaves them together.
Let's use the Google search engine as an example. Its computers regularly "crawl" the Internet, storing a copy of every web page encountered. Then it indexes each page based on the information it contains. When you do a Google search, it looks up your search terms in their indexes and then lists the web pages that best match your search. This entire process takes place in their data centers.
Data center in action
Copies of all those web pages are stored on computers in Google's data centers. All the indexing and processing that goes into answering your searches is done on computers in these data centers. It's a big job, and they need lots of computers to do it, and lots of data centers to house those computers.
The people who work in the data-centers keep the computers up and running every minute of every day. They monitor, diagnose, fix and replace all of the data-center's machines and systems as needed, so Google can provide search results and other services around the clock to their millions of users.
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