What's a data center?

A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of computers that store and serve vast amounts of data. Most medium to large-sized companies have, or use, some kind of data center. But for Google, data centers are especially important.

Super-sized storage space

Google's mission is to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. To process and store all this data as well as all the context that weaves it together, we need lots of computing power.

Let's use the Google search engine as an example. Our computers regularly "crawl" the Internet, storing a copy of every web page encountered. Then we index each page based on the information it contains. When you do a Google search, we look up your search terms in our index and then list the web pages that best match your search. This entire process takes place in our data centers.

Data center in action

All the indexing and processing that goes into answering your searches is done on computers in our data centers. It's a big job, and we need lots of computers to do it, and lots of data centers to house those computers. The people who work in the data center keep the computers up and running throughout the day. They monitor, diagnose, fix, and replace all of the data center's machines and systems as needed, so Google can provide fast and reliable services around the clock to our millions of users.

 

Technicians