Question

What is a Google data center, and how many do they operate? How does Google manage global distribution of data? What is Spanner? How does it operate? Does Google rely on any proprietary data storage or data processing technologies? How does Google handle security in its data centers?

Answer 1

• Google data centers are data warehouses that google uses for its services such as its mail service, google search engine, google assistant, google drive etc.
• Currently there are 16 google data centers as per the official google site.
• Google has 9 locations in Americas, 2 in Asia and 5 in Europe to manage global distribution data. These locations are connected by around 2.5 million servers.
• Spanner is google's own database system based on NewSQL.
• Spanner works as a distributed database. It has high scalability. It uses Paxos algorithm to manage its data. It can complete both read-only and read-write operations. The actual working of Spanner is very complex.
• Google relies on its own Linux based operating system. They also use their own hardware whose sole purpose is data storage with lesser peripheral devices. Data processing is done using Google's own machine learning and deep learning algorithms.
• Google handles all its data centers on its own without any third party to maintain high security standards. To avoid physical intrusion, Google uses state of the art security features including biometrics, 24/7 monitoring, encryption using HTTPS/TLS, access cards, to name a few.