What is a Data Center?

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: A Google search, a YouTube video, a connected Nest device, and hundreds of Google Cloud services all give you a response in a fraction of a second. But what really happens when you

click Search, send a request, or say, OK, Google. Well, your message travels over the public internet and into Google's global fiber network. Millions of these requests,

or packets of data, travel through miles of cable over land and under sea, converging at one of the many data centers we operate all over the world. But besides delivering

quick results back to you, what exactly is a data center? A data center is a building with powerful computers used to run a company's services. It's where information is processed and made available. Data is stored, managed,

and disseminated across these computers. And network infrastructure is installed to support web apps, databases, virtual machines, and more. Often, organizations start

with their own modest buildings made up of a few server racks, which requires maintaining these systems, paying for cooling, and handling increasing demand. So many companies look to a cloud services provider like Google Cloud.

These providers' data centers have evolved into large campuses of multiple buildings. Hyperscale data centers, made up of tens of thousands of servers, process big data,

support cloud computing, and serve billions of users for services like Chrome, Maps, Gmail, Search, and Google Cloud. In the cloud world, companies and users can benefit from this scale

because of a special thing called multitenancy. This means customers can share the resources of each server in a data center, like tenants sharing common resources of an apartment building. Each tenant's cloud systems

are isolated and invisible to other tenants. This means higher compute processing and storage, a more efficient use of data center resources, and a much lower cost than if you managed your own servers.

Google Cloud customers can even deploy resources in regions across the world, which are enterprise data center locations with three or more zones. Zones are deployment areas that map to clusters of machines with distinct physical infrastructure.

Companies can deploy workloads across multiple zones to help protect against unexpected failures, something you can't always get with a single, private data center. It takes a right mix of energy,

cooling, and people to keep a data center up and running. But it's a technical feat Google's managed to pull off to optimize for efficiency, scale, and cost. More on that next time on

"Discovering Data Centers." [MUSIC PLAYING]