Ever wondered where all those emails, searches and videos actually live? We call it the cloud so casually that you could almost imagine everything floating somewhere above us. Then you see a data centre and the picture changes completely.
There are buildings full of machines behind that tiny loading circle on your phone. Here is an illustrated look at what goes on inside one. For a real view of Google’s facilities, its own data centre photo gallery is a good place to look.
First comes the room full of computers
A server is a computer doing work for other computers. Put many of them into racks, connect them to a network, and you start to see why the room looks so different from a normal office. The space is arranged around the machines and the people who maintain them.
And no, every blinking light does not mean something is wrong. A busy room can have plenty of lights while everything is working normally. The people running it use monitoring systems to find out what actually needs attention.
Then comes the heat. Lots of it.
Your laptop gets warm when it works hard. Now imagine a whole building doing computer work. Moving that heat away becomes part of the job, rather than something you think about only when a machine feels hot.
Fans, air handling equipment and, in some facilities, liquid cooling help carry heat away from the equipment. Designs vary between buildings. The pipes and machinery are there for a reason, even if the server racks tend to get all the attention in photographs.
The cloud needs some very ordinary things
Electricity, cables, maintenance and people who know what they are looking at. It sounds less magical when you put it that way, right? A data centre depends on all of those things working together. Backup power arrangements also matter when the usual electricity supply is interrupted.
The noise is another reminder that this is a physical place. Equipment moving air or water can produce a steady sound, and the building needs to manage that along with everything else. We have a closer look at that in why data centres make so much noise.
Want to have a look around?
This Google video offers a 360 degree tour of a real data centre. Drag around the picture while it plays and you can look beyond the bit directly in front of you.
Next time someone says a file is in the cloud, you will probably picture a building, a lot of cables and some very busy cooling equipment. Slightly less mysterious. Still quite impressive.
