I work at a campus that recently chose google hosted apps for email, calendaring, documents, etc… It was truly a game-changer for students and staff. As if we traded in a Datsun truck for a Porche 911.

All the more reason to be intrigued with these “did you know” style info graphics about Google in general.

Particularly interesting was this statement about shipping containers at Google’s data centers:

Curious, I found this video tour of a Google container data center:

At first, I was simply curious about the shipping containers themselves, but the electrical and cooling systems of the facility are very impressive. My father is an electrician in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I’ve spent my fair share of summers bending conduit and running wire. Even for someone familiar with industrial power configurations, the sheer scale and magnitude of those electrical systems is difficult to grasp.

And that’s just one tour, of ONE facility. How many of these data centers does google have?

As of 2008, “If you include data centers that are under construction, Google has 19 locations in the US where they operate data centers, 12 in Europe, one in Russia, one in South America, and three in Asia. ..According to Google’s earnings reports, they spent $1.9 billion on data centers in 2006, and $2.4 billion in 2007″

As to the safety and integrity of google-stored data:

How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It’s usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you’re willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you’re willing to go without service after a disaster.

..For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover. We do this through live or synchronous replication: every action you take in Gmail is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, we nearly instantly transfer your data over to the other one that’s also been reflecting your actions.

This post reeks of an advertisement for google apps, but its even less honorable than that. I just wanted to brag.

Related:

A video every university IT manager should watch: Dumping Campus Email for Gmail.

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the old Cosmos series. Carl Sagan was, well, a captivating hero of science.

Even after super stardom though, Sagan was actively involved in recruiting students to his academic department at Cornell. Writing letters. Giving lab tours. Driving kids to the bus station.

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