Data centres: Major IT companies make a step towards greater transparency

Our favorite IT companies are slowly revealing information about their data centres. Facebook and Google have indeed released some pictures and information about the facilities they store their users’ data in. A couple of journalists were also allowed in for a visit. Companies seem willing to be more transparent about data centres but those facilities remain much too crucial to be completely open. Here is why.

Wired magazines’ journalists must have been delighted to visit Google’s data centres in Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city is indeed the home of what used to be one of the most secret data centres. During the month of October 2012, Google had been willing to display a good deal of transparency and therefore organized an exceptional tour inside its facilities. Photos and interviews were released in the press for the enjoyment of the IT geek community all around the world.

It might be surprising at first to see how protective Google is of its data centres. Most of them are filled with personal information and the company is not the first one to open the way to visitors through such installations. In 2011, Facebook had already made some light about its own facilities. The giant of social networking indeed organized tours in its very first data centre set in Prineville Oregon. Such an event had two goals at that time: first to make some buzz about the launch of the Open Compute project and second to make a step toward greater transparency and weaken returning accusations of opacity. Throwing doors open on a $210 million facility is however not a common thing for the industry. The late relaxing of major IT companies’ secret policy is indeed surprising.

For a long time, data centres indeed remained top-secret and fueled the media fantasy that IT companies hid much more than servers in those data centres. Eventually, the street view visit of the Lenoir data centre shows that Google hides nothing but some of the most efficient computers in the world. However, it is not difficult to understand why the company was – and still is – reluctant to give detail about those facilities: they are the most strategic part of Google’s activity. The extreme density of its infrastructure is what allows the company to handle billions of search queries every day and to offer free storage services to millions of Gmail, YouTube and Blogger users every day!

Any intrusion, any breakdown is very likely to compromise IT companies’ abilities to offer a product of unparalleled quality. What would be the point of Google if its search engine wasn’t comprehensive and instantaneous? Who would use Facebook anymore if the network’s capacity wasn’t important enough to greet the profiles of entire circles of friends? Even though IT champions now feel secure enough to share a bit more their strategic infrastructure with their community, data centres will remain some of the best kept industrial facilities – crucial completive advantages depend on it –.