Google Data Center, The Dalles

in Places You'll Never Visit

Google is one of the world’s leading internet companies, helping to shape modern culture while making an awful lot of money. As proprietors Perhaps the world’s leading search engine, the business requires Vast Banks of Computer servers to keep things working. Its enormous Data Center at The Dalles was built amid great secrecy at a cost of US $600 million and opened in 2006.

Famously, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still studying at Stanford University and incorporated as a private company in 1998 its Mission, and its own words is to “ organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” since the initial launch of its search engine this Mission has seen Google diversify into software, social networking, and even computer operating systems.

The company is,  unsurprisingly, unwilling to divulge great detail about its server centers around the world, so estimates suggest there may be more than 10 of these facilities spread around the globe, housing perhaps a million individual server units.

when Google came to construct its first custom-designed facility, a site on Columbia River not far from The Dalles Dam Offered not only suitable land on which to build and a local population to work there ( employees number around 200), but also the possibility of plentiful and green hydroelectric energy. A business such as Google inevitably consumes enormous quantities of electricity, and the chance to build a more environmentally friendly facility fitted in neatly with the companies declared motto: “ Don’t be evil.”

the Datacenter, codenamed “Project 02”  in its early days, was shrouded in secrecy when it opened – even visiting journalist were required to sign confidentiality agreements. Although the secrecy level has since declined, security – both of site itself and the data it contains – remains of paramount importance.

A full-time information security Team Works to ensure the Integrity of electronically health information, while the center itself is surrounded by a perimeter fence that is controlled by guards and constantly under closed-circuit surveillance. while Google wishes to make the world’s information universally Accessible, it clearly Harbors no such Ambitions for its own data centers.