In Pictures: Google’s giant datacentres – an inside look - Slideshow

Inside Google The tech world has long speculated on the amount of computing power that it must take to run a network of web services as titanic as Google’s, but the company has always been famously paranoid about preserving the secrecy of its facilities – until now. The search giant has just released an illuminating series of photographs from within its data centers.
Scale… This picture, taken at Google’s Council Bluffs, Iowa, facility, gives a sense of the sheer scale of the company’s data centers.
…and complexity This is only part of the sophisticated cooling apparatus used to control temperatures at a Google facility in Douglas County, Ga. Workers apparently use the bike to get around the data center.
Backup Unsurprisingly, the Council Bluffs facility has a pretty big tape library for backup purposes.
From Iowa… The cooling towers at the Council Bluffs facility.
…to Georgia… Yes, like I said, Google has some BIG data centers.
… to Finland. The company’s recently opened facility at Hamina, Finland, saves on cooling costs by, you know, being in Finland. The ice-cold Gulf of Finland, in particular, helps a lot.
Maintenance Remember, kids, this Google employee, at the Mayes County, Okla., facility is a professional. Do not attempt to climb servers in your own data center.
A very serious clown And definitely don’t try to do what this Lenoir, N.C., employee is doing without expert training and supervision.
Swapping out motherboards This worker at Google’s facility in The Dalles, Ore., is replacing a motherboard, though we’ll admit we thought he was just expressing his frustrations at first.
Recycling To ensure the safety of user data, all failed drives are destroyed immediately, Google says.