It Starts With Send
Ever wondered what happens when you send an email? Take a journey with Gmail and find out. Along the way, discover our data centers through videos, photos and more. It all begins when you click send.
Over to Google
Once your message leaves your Internet Service Provider (ISP), it enters an Internet backbone router. Here’s where Google picks up your message and guides it to the closest Google data center. To provide the best possible user experience, we try to pick up your requests as early as possible from the local ISP, so we’ve built an extensive Internet backbone across the U.S.
Safe and Secure
We understand the importance of keeping your personal data secure. That’s why we protect your message with a wide range of security measures. Security cameras, iris scans and fingerprint scans at our data centers are just a few of the measures we take to secure and protect your information.
Smart Heat
Google runs some of the greenest data centers in the world. In fact, we’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification of our high environmental standards. One way we save energy is by keeping the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That means we don’t need as much energy-intensive air-conditioning, and our employees get to wear shorts to work.
Clear Instructions
When your email reaches the data center, it needs some guidance on where to go next. The networking room sends your message on its way, directing it to the servers that handle Gmail.
An Efficient Server Floor
Your message then enters our server floor. Our servers support many products at a time — that’s “the cloud.” It means we can do more with less — more searches and more Gmail with fewer servers and less energy. In fact, our data centers are some of the most efficient in the world, using 50% less energy than typical data centers. Our large scale also helps us better serve our customers by backing up data in multiple places and letting businesses easily increase their storage and speed.
Hard-working Machines
Our servers work together to process your data, including duplicating your message to create backups, scanning it for viruses, and filtering for spam. To cool the equipment doing all this work, we use energy-saving methods inspired by the natural environment around us. We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient.
Clean Power
Whenever we can, we buy green power from wind farms near our data centers. We provide money to build new wind projects that generate more clean power for the community. This, along with efficiency and investing in other projects, helps us eliminate our impact on climate change.
Instant Delivery
And there you have it! Now you know how email travels to help you keep in touch. You also know more about the innovative ways our data centers protect your information and conserve energy.
