Monday, April 25, 2011

Video looks inside Google data center

A seven-minute video posted on YouTube leads viewers through the security measures that Google takes within its data centers. In addition to information about how the company controls access to its data center facilities, the video provides some entertaining views of the destruction of hard drives that have reached the end of their useful lives. Google's point is to emphasize the measures it takes to protect the customer data on those drives.

About 3:45 into the video is a demonstration of a machine dubbed "the crusher," which pushes a steel piston through the drive. Next for the unfortunate former piece of computing equipment is the drive shredder, which does exactly what you would expect a drive shredder to do. The shredded drives are recycled.

Cabling also makes its way into the conversation. About 5:30 into the video, the narrator states, "Google data centers are connected to the Internet via high-speed fiber-optic cabling. In each data center there are multiple redundant connections to protect against the possibility of a failure from a single connection."

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