Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Promoting sportsmanship on the field - and on the net
Sunday, January 11, 2015
In football, a red card means expulsion from the game. On the Internet, what would a red card resemble? This week, we launched a contest here in Belgium with the Mons Football Club youth clubs to help find out.
Why Belgium and why Mons? One of our two largest European data centers is located just outside the city. We’ve invested hundreds of millions in it and that means we are going to be involved in the local community for a long time to come. Belgium’s football reputation has been growing recently with an excellent showing at the recent Brazil World Cup - its top players are found sprinkled on many of the world’s top team - and the Mons youth academy is known as one of the country’s best.
Launching the contest in Belgium
The idea came from our strong partnership with the local
Mundaneum
institution and a
partnership
forged last year with one of the world’s biggest football clubs - Real Madrid. It held a contest called
"First Prize for the Promotion of Internet Values.”
As in football, the Net bans violence towards others. When you play sports, you are obliged to help all who are injured or have a disability. On the Internet, too, you need to help others.
The Belgian contest will be open to 11-17 olds, the teenagers who are growing up on the net. From this month through April, the club’s teenage players will attend workshops and create projects - drawings, videos, or essays - that marry their passion for football, fair play and the Internet.
More than 120 young players from RAEC Mons attended the
contest launch
. Dressed in their team uniforms, most said they spent as much or more time surfing on the Net as on the playing field. They will now compete for prizes ranging from a Chromebook to a tablet. Winners will be announced on April 19 at the club’s final home match this season.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Europe
Dutch windmills to power Google’s Eemshaven data centre
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Netherlands is famous for its
windmills
, which over the years have been used to saw wood, mill corn, pump water and much more. Now, a new generation of Dutch windmill - wind turbines - will power a very 21st century facility: our
new EUR 600m data centre
, currently under construction in the north of the Netherlands.
Thanks to a new long-term agreement signed this week with Dutch power company Eneco, our Eemshaven datacenter will be 100% powered by renewable energy from its first day of operation, scheduled for the first half of 2016. We’ve agreed to buy the entire output of a new Eneco windfarm -- currently under construction at Delfzijl, near Eemshaven -- for the next ten years.
By entering into long-term agreements like this one with wind farm developers, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new renewable energy facilities.
This is the third such power purchase agreement (PPA) we’ve signed in Europe in the last 18 months - the other two were with wind farm developers in Sweden and will power our Hamina, Finland datacenter with renewable energy.
Eneco’s new windfarm is an onshore-offshore development, which will use 19 turbines to generate 62 MW of renewable energy. Eneco expects the construction of the windfarm to provide employment for 80 people over the next 18 months.
This marks our eighth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy around the globe. We sign these contracts for a few reasons: they make great financial sense for us by guaranteeing a long term source of clean energy for our data center and they also increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment.
Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team
Expanding our data centres in Europe
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
The Internet is growing fast and so is demand for our services, from search to Gmail and YouTube. In order to keep up with this growth, we are announcing a new EUR600 million investment over the next four years to build a new
data centre
in Eemshaven, the Netherlands.
Groundbreaking at our new data centre site in the Eemshaven with, on the right, Dutch Economics Minister Henk Kamp
At a time of high unemployment throughout Europe, the project promises a welcome infusion of jobs. Construction will provide work for more than 1000 workers. We expect to start initial operations in the first half of 2016 and to be fully operational by the end of 2017. By then, the centre will create employment for more than 150 people in a range of full-time and contractor roles. The jobs do not require phds in computer science; they include IT technicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, catering, facilities and security staff.
The new Dutch data centre will benefit from the latest designs in cooling and electrical technology. It will be free-cooled - taking advantage of natural assets like cool air and grey water to keep our servers cool. Our data centers use 50% less energy than a typical datacenter - and our intention is to run this new facility on renewable energy.
This will be Google’s fourth hyper efficient facility in Europe. Importantly, demand for Internet services remains so strong that the new building does not mean a reduction in expansion elsewhere. Our expansion will continue in Dublin in
Ireland
, in Hamina in
Finland
, and in St. Ghislain in
Belgium
. Our existing rented datacenter facility in Eemshaven also will continue to operate.
Since our investment in our first European datacenter back in 2007, we have been on the lookout for supportive communities with the necessary resources to support large data centers. The required ingredients are land, workforce, networking, a choice of power and other utilities including renewable energy supplies.
It’s much more efficient to build a few large facilities than many small ones. Eemshaven enjoys a direct cable connection to two major European Internet hubs, London and Amsterdam. In the Eemshaven, we've found a great community in a great location that meets the needs to become a backbone for the expanding Internet.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Data Centre Community Relations, Europe
Honoring Finland’s Famed Architect Alvar Aalto
Monday, August 25, 2014
Alvar Aalto
changed the way we see the world. Finland’s famed architect and designer not only built path-breaking buildings - during his long, fruitful life, he also designed some of the 20th century’s most innovative furniture, textiles and glassware. Today, we’re proud to announce a partnership with the
Alvar Aalto Foundation
to bring much of this genius’s important work online - allowing anyone, anywhere to virtually visit many of his his most important buildings and learn about his design breakthroughs.
This project means something special to many of us at Google. We have built one of our two largest
data centers
in Finland - and the architect of our data center building was none other than Aalto. The Finnish master originally designed our data center in Hamina as a paper mill. The mill closed in 2007. We took over the empty building, transformed and expanded it, investing so far almost a billion euros and creating hundreds of jobs in the region, while attempting to keep intact as much as possible of the Aalto heritage. Take a look. We’re publishing new Street View images of the renovated exterior and interior today on our main data center page.
Aalto designed many other buildings in the area around our data center - including the world-famed Sunila worker housing in Kotka. We long have shown the outsides of these buildings on StreetView. We’re now adding the interiors.
Many of Aalto’s most famous buildings are located hundreds of kilometers apart, making them difficult to visit. We toured the entire country to photograph his most important masterpieces. We went to his hometown Jyvaskyla in central Finland and photographed the
Alvar Aalto Museum
and
Säynätsalo Town Hall
.
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We went to Imatra and are presenting the famed Church of the Three Crosses.
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In the Finnish capital Helsinki, we captured not only Aalto’s own studio but also two important cultural buildings, Finlandia Hall and the House of Culture. At the Restaurant Savoy, Aalto brought Finnish nature into the center of Helsinki, designing still-in-production door knobs, clean-lined lighting fixtures, club chairs, and the famed Savoy vase, mirroring the outlines of a Finnish lake.
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The cooperation with Finland’s Aalto Foundation includes
two new online exhibitions
on our Google Cultural Institute platform. The first focuses on Aalto’s famed
three legged stool 60
. This much imitated model relied on one of Aalto’s most important innovations - a new process for bending wood that he applied to create organic shapes. The stool was designed in 1933 and was first used in two major early works of Aalto: Paimio Sanatorium and Vyborg Library before becoming an iconic piece of modernist furniture for people to furnish their homes with.
A second exhibition describes the renovation of the
Vyborg Library
. The building was immediately considered a modernist chef d’oeuvre, softening and humanizing the hard edges of German Bauhaus strictures into a new original, organic style, replacing steel with wood, and creating a warm, cosy atmosphere for the reader. When the Library was constructed, the city of Viipuri was in Finland. After World War II, Finland was forced to hand it over to the Soviet Union and it became Vyborg. The library survived the war but remained unused for twenty years and fell into disrepair. Finally in 2013 the renovation was completed.
Together, these initiatives demonstrate our commitment and confidence in Finland. This is a hard time for the country, with growth slowing and unemployment rising. At the same time, our Hamina data centre keeps expanding and Internet infrastructure represent an important ray of economic hope. As this project demonstrates, we are committed to the country and are delighted to use the Internet to promote Finnish culture.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Europe
Bringing the Father of the Internet to Finland
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Back in the 1970s, Vint Cerf played a decisive role developing what became the backbone of the future Internet - TCP/IP protocol that allowed computers to communicate with each other over an arbitrarily large number of networks. This “father of the Internet” recently visited Finland, home to our EUR850 million data centre in Eastern Finland and addressed an audience of 300 students at the beautiful new
Vellamo Museum
.
Many of our data centres are located in traditional industrial areas where one might not immediately think of being the home for a Google facility. In Finland, the region around our data center is struggling with the decline of its traditional economic motor - the paper industry. In March 2009, we purchased Summa Mill from Finnish paper company Stora Enso and converted the 60 year old paper mill. The first phase of the facility became operational in September 2011 and serves Google users across Europe and around the world.
During the recent event with Vint, the local data center directors Arni Jonsson and Herman Arsaelsson demystified the data center. They talke about how our investment is about more than just bricks, mortar and servers. Its about jobs. In Hamina, we’re providing work for (at peak) approximately 800 engineering and construction workers. In addition, the data center provides full time jobs for people who come from diverse backgrounds and skills. All of our open positions can be found on
Google Jobs page
.
Our economic and academic partners in Finland told about how we are helping the region to fly into the flourishing 21rst century digital economy. In the spring of 2013, we announced a new partnership with
Aalto University
and the regional development agency
Cursor
. With Google's financial support, Aalto University is strengthening the Venture Gym acceleration program around the growing Playa Game Industry Hub, as well as the region's Kaakko 135 travel and tourism initiative.
Vint continued by wowing everyone with a lecture about the past and future of the net. Take a look above at some of the highlights and enjoy a few minutes of news from the north of Europe.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Europe
Improving our data centre energy performance
Friday, April 4, 2014
At Google we’re obsessed with building energy efficient
data centers
. Our facilities use 50% less energy than most other data centers, and we’re pushing ourselves to become even more efficient.
As part of this effort, our main European data centres, in St. Ghislain, Belgium, Hamina, Finland, and Dublin, Ireland recently were added to our ISO 50001 certification. Much like the environmental and workforce safety management certifications, ISO 50001 ensures we have a strong energy policy, build a robust auditing program, continually monitor, assess, and respond to our energy efficiency results.
Google Data Centere in Finland
Last year, we became the first company in North America to obtain a multi-site ISO 50001 certification for that system, covering our corporate data center operations and six U.S. data centers.
Another green priority for us is energy. Over the past year, we have signed two major contracts to buy all the electricity generated by Swedish wind farms for 10 years. By entering into long-term agreements with wind farm developers over the past few years, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new facilities. Once completed, the wind farms will provide Google’s Hamina, Finland, data center with additional renewable energy as the facility expands in coming years.
Overall, we're focused on reducing our energy use while serving the explosive growth of the Internet. Most data centers use just as much non-computing or “overhead” energy (like cooling and power conversion) as they do to power their servers. At Google we’ve reduced this overhead to only 12%. That way, most of the energy we use powers the machines directly serving Google searches and products. We will continually push toward doing more with less—serving more users while consuming less energy.
Posted by Joe Kava, Vice President, Data Centres Operations
Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture
Thursday, March 20, 2014
The Belgian city of
Mons
becomes a European capital of culture next year, ushering in 12 months of festivities. One of Google’s two major European
data centers
is located just down the road from the city, making us a major local investor and employer. It is only natural that we want to help put some sparkle into the city’s ambitious capital of culture plans.
At today’s press conference launch of the
Mons 2015 program
, we launched something special and sparkling - new Indoor
Street View
images. Street View cars and trikes captured new imagery of some of Mons’s most famous buildings - both their exteriors - and for the first time, their interiors. These include the splendid Grand Place, including the inside of the the
City Hall
, the
Collégiale Sainte Waudru
, and the
BAM
art museum.
Mons is an architectural treasure. The canonesses of the Sainte Waudru religious community began their first church in 1450 and the Brabant Gothic style church remains of the most beautiful buildings in Mons. Inside, the exceptional Treasure of Sainte Waudru houses a precious collection of gold and remarkable 16th-century alabaster statues from the artist and Mons resident
Jacques du Broeucq
.
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The historic city centre is dominated by the
Grand Place
and its remarkable City Hall. Commissioned by
Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy
, famed architect Matthijs de Layens designed the imposing edifice.
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Throughout the coming year and a half, we’ll continue to support the Mons 2015 adventure, in particular by working with our longtime partners, the
Mundaneum
archive. More than a century ago, two visionary Belgians envisioned the World Wide Web’s architecture of hyperlinks and indexation of information, not on computers, but on paper cards. Their creation was called the Mundaneum.
The Mundaneum plans an exciting “Mapping Knowledge” exhibition. Together, we are bringing high-level speakers to the city to explore Internet issues. Our own chief Internet evangelist and “father of the Internet”
Vint Cerf
recently visited and presented his vision of the future to a packed audience at the city’s 600 seat Manege Theater. Mons’ time on the big stage of European culture promises many more exciting events.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Europe
More Swedish wind power for our Finnish data centre
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
We’re keen to make sure that our data centres around the world use as much renewable energy as possible. By entering into
long-term agreements
with wind farm developers over the past few years, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new facilities.
Today we announced that we’ve signed a new power purchase agreement (PPA) in Sweden (our
second such agreement
there in less than 12 months). We will buy the entire electricity output of four as-yet-unbuilt wind farms in southern Sweden, at a fixed price, for the next ten years.
Windfarm developer
Eolus Vind
will build four wind farms, in Alered, Mungseröd, Skalleberg and Ramsnäs, Sweden. The 29-turbine project, with a total combined capacity of 59MW, already has all relevant planning approvals and permits and will become fully operational in early 2015.
Picture: Our seawater-cooled data centre in Hamina, Finland
Once completed, the wind farms will provide Google’s Hamina, Finland, data centre with additional renewable energy as the facility
expands
in coming years.
Buying renewable energy in Sweden and consuming it in Finland is possible thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated power markets, in particular the Nord Pool spot market. This allows Google to buy renewable energy with Guarantee of Origin certification in Sweden, “retire” the certificates and then consume an equivalent amount of power elsewhere in Europe.
This marks our sixth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy. We keep signing these contracts for two main reasons: they make great financial sense for us, and increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment too.
Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team
Joining Belgium and Finland around data centres
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
At first glance, it’s hard to think of two cultures more different than Belgium’s southern French speaking
Wallonia
and Finland’s southeastern lake region. Finland is rural, Nordic, and Lutheran, a place of big spaces, big forests, and big lakes. Belgium is urban, Latin and Roman Catholic, a place of crowded industrial landscapes, carefully cultivated fields and man-made canals.
Sunset at our data centre in Belgium
And yet, both are homes to
Google data centres
, and when our Finnish partners recently visited Belgium for two days of workshops, they found many things in common. Both regions built their economies on big traditional industries that are fast disappearing - paper and pulp in Finland, coal and steel in Belgium. Both have big neighbors - Russia and France. And both have a willpower to work with us to help jump, as our partners put it, “from the Industrial Heartland to the Internet age.”
It was a fruitful two day visit. The dozen-person Finnish team, lead by the regional development agency
Cursor
and
Aalto University
, told about their success in spawning video games startups and boosting online local tourism. The Belgian team, led by the local
Mundaneum Museum
spoke about plans to use the net for its upcoming 2015 celebration of the regional capital and hometown Mons as a European capital of culture.
We also compared common challenges - improving the two regions’ level of English and other skills needed to attract international business. Both regions aim to create web incubators and web startups, projects we are aim to support.
Over the past year, we have disbursed more than EUR1 million of grants to local organizations around the data centers. These fund a wide range of activities, from a Popmaton at
Mons’ Andy Warhol exhibit
to measuring water health in southeastern Finland’s rivers to supporting a computer science contest at the
University of Mons,
including exhibitions and talks on Internet issues and opportunities in both countries. It was gratifying to see our partners getting to know each other personally and pledging to work together to common goals. We have dug deep roots in these two different but similar regions and plan to continue planting deep roots in computer science, environment and empowering cultural institution.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Brussels
Expanding our data center in Finland
Monday, November 4, 2013
Six decades ago, the famed Finnish architect
Alvar Aalto
built a stunning red-brick paper mill in Eastern Finland. After the plant was shut, we bought it have transformed it into a modern data center - literally jumping from the industrial to the digital age. Today, Finnish Prime Minister
Jyrki Katainan
joined us at our Hamina data center in Eastern Finland to announce a EUR450 million expansion to what already is one of the world’s most efficient and largest facilities.
Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainan visits our Hamina construction site.
Many of our data centres are located in traditional industrial areas where one might not immediately think of being the home for a Google facility. In Finland, the region around our Hamina data centre stands at the heart of a region hard-hit by the retrenchment of its paper industry.
Our data centers can provide real motors to reinvigorate these industrial regions. With our financial support, the prestigious
Aalto University
and the regional development agency Cursor are working to bolster promising startups and to improve the use of the Internet by local small and medium sized industries. Cursor is strengthening the
Venture Gym
acceleration program around the growing
Playa Game Industry Hub
, as well as the region's
Kaakko 135 travel
and tourism initiative. Already, some 800 people and dozens of companies in the region have participated in Aalto-Cursor workshops, not only in the region, but also in Helsinki, London and Cambridge.
Today’s announcement will triple the size of the existing facility, which became operational in September 2011. At its peak, approximately 800 engineering and construction workers, most of whom will be Finnish, will be engaged on the site. Some 125 people currently employed at the datacenter in full time and contractor roles across engineering, technical work, security, food service, and buildings and grounds maintenance. All of our open positions can be found on
Google Jobs page
for positions in Finland.
Alvar Aalto never lived to see the Internet and data centers. But we hope he would have been pleased to see how our data center safeguards and updates his spirit of pioneering architecture.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of community relations, Europe
An unusual meeting of minds in Belgium
Monday, October 28, 2013
It will be a special moment when one of the “fathers’ of the Internet meets some of the “grandfathers." This evening,
Vint Cerf
, who helped pioneer the Internet’s original protocol in the 1980s, will travel to Mons in Belgium for a event celebrating the
Mundaneum
. Click below to enjoy live streaming of the event from the Manege Theater.
More than a century ago, two visionary Belgians envisioned the World Wide Web’s architecture of hyperlinks and indexation of information, not on computers, but on paper cards. Their creation was called the
Mundaneum
. Two years ago, Google struck a partnership with the Mundaneum to support the archive’s exhibitions, conferences, and other activities. Since then, the relationship has bloomed. A Google data centre is located near Mons and the Mundaneum has become a key partner in working with us to dig deep roots in the region.
As demand for our products grows, we’re investing hundreds of millions of Euros in expanding our European data centres. According to the the Wallonia Agency for Foreign Investment, our EUR550 million investment makes us one of Belgium’s largest investors. A data center is about more than just bricks, mortar and servers, too. Its about jobs. All of our open positions can be found on
Google Jobs page
for positions in Belgium.
In Mons, Vint will meet local web entrepreneurs in town, at the local
Beaux-Arts Mons museum
, which is featuring an
Andy Warhol exhibition
. Google is supporting the exhibition’s online activities.
On Tuedsay Vint will travel to Ghent for a repeat performance at the
Minard Theater
. We also have deep roots in Ghent. The Ghent University’s library owns a linguistic treasure trove of centuries-old books in English, French, German and Dutch. As a
Google book partner
, we have scanned more than 200,000 of the library’s out of copyright works. Works that once were relegated to hard-to-reach library shelves and received only an occasional reader now get more than than 100,000 views each day on the Net. That’s quite an achievement for a father of the Internet to celebrate.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Data Centre Community Relations, Europe.
Creating jobs in Europe’s industrial heartland
Friday, June 7, 2013
It was a standing room only crowd. More than 400 Belgians, including
Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo
, small business owners, teachers and students, recently jammed into the Mundaneum museum’s headquarters in Mons near our St. Ghislain data center. They had come to hear a full day series of Google-supported lectures and presentations at the region’s first ever
Web Jobs Fair
.
As demand for our products grows, we’re investing hundreds of millions of Euros in expanding our data centres Europe. Many of our data centres are located in traditional industrial areas where one might not immediately think of being the home for a Google facility. Our St. Ghislain facility in southern Belgium sits in the heart of a traditional coal mining region. In Finland, the region around our Hamina data centre was a military capital for the country and the heart of the now struggling paper industry.
In St. Ghislain, we announced a EUR300 million additional investment this spring, and we get excited about expansions because our investment in a data center is about more than just bricks, mortar and servers. At the peak of construction, for example, the expansion will provide employment for around 350 engineering and construction workers. In Hamina, we’re investing an additional EUR150 million, providing work for (at peak) approximately 500 engineering and construction workers.
Further, the data center provides full time jobs for people who come from diverse backgrounds and skills. Already, more than 180 work at our data center in St. Ghislain, both direct Google employees and full-time contractors, and 125 at our Hamina facility. And the jobs at our data centers are not just for computer scientists. While some positions require backgrounds in hardware operations, many are for electricians, plumbers as well some some non-technical administrative roles.
With this new expansion we are back in hiring mode for all of these types of jobs. While we are fortunate to get applications from around the globe for these positions, we love to hire locally and many of our current data center employees are from the immediate region. Since we work in English, we require all candidates to be to carry out tasks in English, but if you have a passion for working in a fast moving environment with people who are dedicated to making a large operation hum and have skills in any of these areas, we’d love to hear from you. All of our open positions can be found on
Google Jobs page
here
for positions in Finland and
here
for positions in Belgium.
Data centers are critical to our ability to provide all of our services. We are so delighted to have found wonderful homes in
Hamina
and
St. Ghislain
, and many more exciting years ahead. For more info on these two data centers please visit our site for and google.com/
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Brussels
Sparking an Internet revolution in Finland’s traditional heartland
Monday, April 29, 2013
Several of Google’s data centres are located in traditional industrial centres, regions that typically have a good combination of industrial infrastructure, developable land and available workforce. In Belgium, our facility in
St. Ghislain
sprouted amid closed or shuttered coal mines. In Finland, we purchased the Summa Paper Mill in
Hamina
in March 2009, from Finnish paper company Stora Enso.
We’re keen to help these regions make the transition from old to new industries, and that’s why today in Finland we’re announcing a new partnership with
Aalto University
and the regional development agency
Cursor
.
The new partnership deepens an already strong Google presence in Eastern Finland. We’ve already converted the 60 year old paper mill into a
data centre
, investing an initial EUR200 million. More than 2,000 individuals working for 50 companies (mostly Finnish and from the local area) contributed to the project. In August 2012, we announced an additional EUR150 million investment to expand the facility which includes the restoration and conversion of an
Alvar Aalto
-designed machine hall. At peak, we expect the conversion to provide work for approximately 500 engineers and construction workers.
With Google's financial support, Aalto University now will help bolster promising local acceleration programs in southeastern Finland, as well as supporting programs to improve the use of the Internet by local SMEs. The university is one of Finland’s most prestigious educational institutions, and has focused strongly on the creation and expansion of business through technological innovation. It has founded several iconic new concepts like the
Aalto Design Factory
, the
Startup Sauna
and the
Aalto Ventures
.
The Economist
recently praised Aalto for its role in spreading "the word that Finland’s future lay with new companies, not old giants.”
Over the next 12 months, southeastern Finland's regional development agency Cursor will work together with Aalto University to bring entrepreneurship programs such as Startup Sauna to southeastern Finland, encouraging entrepreneurship and supporting the creation of new companies. Cursor will also strengthen the
Venture Gym
acceleration program around the growing
Playa Game Industry Hub
, as well as the region's
Kaakko 135 travel
and tourism initiative. Aalto will provide high level speakers at events, mentors and coaches for acceleration programmes, and moderate networking events to strengthen industry ties.
This represents our second large data centre community relations program launched in Europe. In February, we announced a partnership with the
Mundaneum
archives near our Belgian data center. We have been holding a series of presentations and exhibitions about Google Data Centres and hosted a jobs day, explaining what skills are needed to work at a data center. We will use these learnings to offer similar events in Finland. In both Belgium and Finland, our goal is the same: to show the way from our industrial past to our digital future.
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations
Keeping our data centres green and our employees safe
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
The Internet is a virtual place for most people, but data centres -- the large industrial warehouses filled with servers that power the web -- are anything but. We want our data centres to be both environmentally sustainable and safe places to work, so we make sure that that they meet the highest standards of environmental management and workforce safety. Our three owned-and-operated data centres in Europe - located in
Belgium
,
Finland
and
Ireland
- have now joined our U.S. facilities in receiving
ISO 14001
and
OHSAS 18001
certification.
In order to receive these certifications, you need to say what you’re going to do, then do what you say — and then keep improving. The ISO and OHSAS standards dictate what key elements are required, but it’s up to us to figure out how to follow through. So we’ve developed a comprehensive system of procedures and improvements that our data center teams follow every day.
Each of our data centres is different, so many of the improvements we’ve implemented are specific to local needs.
In Belgium, we use an evaporative cooling system that’s well-suited to the temperate climate. After cooling the servers, water runs through large cooling towers, where much of it is released as water vapor. This process is very energy efficient, but keeping the cooling towers clean and clear of outdoor dust is a time-consuming process. So the team tried a simple fix: they attached screens to the outsides of the towers, which allow air to flow freely but cut down significantly on the amount of build-up. This worked so well that our other data centers have begun to install screens as well.
Screens keep outdoor dust from entering these cooling towers.
In Ireland, we’ve found a way to use excess heat coming out of the server rooms to heat our office space. Hot air that would normally be sent outside through our cooling infrastructure is instead drawn over an air-to-air heat exchanger, where it is used to heat up incoming fresh air for the office area. This eliminates our need for gas heaters in the facility, and, like in Belgium, it’s working so well that we’re considering implementing it at other facilities.
In Finland, where
we cool the data center with seawater
, we want to bring the temperature down before sending the water back into the Gulf. So we built a “tempering hut,” where we manually mix the outgoing warm water with fresh cold water. We’re constantly tweaking the temperature and amount of the cold water to reach the optimal temperature, and we track that data as part of our ongoing efforts to monitor and improve our operations.
The tempering hut, the small building on the far left, is where we cool water down before returning it to the Gulf of Finland.
We want to lead the industry in environmental management and workplace safety, and we’re proud to be the first major Internet services company to achieve these certifications across their entire U.S. and European fleet.
Posted by Joe Kava, VP, Data Centres
A flower of computer history blooms in Belgium
Thursday, February 21, 2013
It’s nice to watch a seed bloom into a radiant flower. Last spring, we announced a partnership with the Belgian institution called
Mundaneum
. Our initial ambitions were modest - to support lectures and exhibitions on the history of the Internet. The lectures and exhibitions proved so popular - one, at our other partner, the University of Ghent,
attracted 900 people
- that today we are delighted to announce a major expansion of our joint work.
The Mundaneum is becoming Belgium’s first partner with
Google’s Cultural Institute
. Our Paris-based Cultural Insitute has embarked on an adventure to revolutionize the way archives are curated and presented. It allows partners to wipe the dust off their documents, images and videos and tell the story that brings them to life in exciting new online exhibitions. Previous partners range from the
Imperial War Museum
to the
Nelson Mandela foundation
.
The Mundaneum team has curated two new online exhibitions consisting of documents, photos and videos using the Cultural Institute’s innovative digital curation tool.
One
tells the story of Mundaneum founders Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s quest to organise the world’s information on paper cards in the pre-digital age. The
second
celebrates the centenary of La Fontaine’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Both exhibition home pages are pictured below. They are available in English and French, and will soon be published in Dutch.
The Mundaneum’s home region is also home to a
Google data centers
, located in the southern Belgian village of
St. Ghislain
. In many ways, the modern data center has replaced paper cards; it provides the electric and electronic backbone for the modern Internet. This coincidence presents us with a fortuitous opportunity for community relations. In coming weeks, the Mundaneum will launch of series of presentations and exhibitions about Google Data Centers. And since we are hiring at the data center, the Mundaneum will host a jobs day, explaining what skills are needed to work at a data center. Take a look at some images from our St. Ghislain data center.
In 2015, Mons has been named a European capital of culture. We will work with Mundaneum to support this exciting project. Google technologies will be deployed to promote Mons’s historic architectural legacy - as well as its exciting modern cultural initiatives.
At the same time, we hope to spread recognition of the Mundaneum’s exciting adventure outside of Belgium. All too often, Europeans tend to think of the invention of the modern Internet as an American monopoly. In fact, Europeans played a key role. Otlet and LaFontaine created its intellectual roots; Brit
Alan Turing
of cryptology fame imagined much of its early hardware, while a Belgian, Robert Caillau, and another Brit, Tim Berners-Lee, built the World Wide Web.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised by the success of our partnership. A natural affinity exists between Google’s modern project of making the world’s information accessble and the Mundaneum project of two early 20th century Belgians. Otlet and La Fontaine imagined organizing all the world’s information - on paper cards. While their dream was discarded, the Internet brought it back to reality and it's little wonder that many now describe the Mundaneum as “the paper Google.” Together, we are showing the way to marry our paper past with our digital future.
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations
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