From Paper Mill to Data Center for Google

Google created in 2010 a data center from an unused paper mill in Hamina Finland.

According to reports, Google have paid app. $52 million for the mill, claiming it to be the perfect place to build their new data center. As usual, Google was thinking creative, deciding to use the environment and leverage on the already built in granite tunnels (450 meters deep) for pumping water from the Baltic and using it to cool the servers. But before they return the water back to the sea, they cool it down again by mixing it in a separate facility with cold water from the Baltic.

And if it becomes too hot in some of the data centers for the servers to even run, Google uses its propriatary and usually not talked about software tool called "Spanner" which from a presentation in 2009 is described as “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers and that automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.”

It is interesting to see the decline in the paper print businesses and the closing of mills, newspapers only to be substituted by the new type of data distribution systems. Change and progress are incredible when creativity is used.



You can read more from Wired, The Registrer

or you can see the video from Google Efficient Data Centers Summit in 2009 giving more information about the technologies they use in their data centers.