Joe Kava, the VP of data centers for Google, kicked off his presentation with seven years of data center history at Google. So first, the timeline:

• 2005: This is when Google used containers in its data center, where IT hardware is integrated into the data center space.
• 2006: Google created a purpose-built data center where it moved from containers to its own data center design.
• 2007: Google addressed the supply chain issues with “modular at scale” to support the cost-effective and faster way to build out its data center capacity.
• 2008/2009: In this year, metrics like PUE and best practices are used and shared.
• 2010: Google launches its renewable energy efforts, spending over a billion dollars on the initiative. It has reached 260 MW of renewable energy acquired by 2012.
• 2011: A year for standards — the data center group meets ISO and OHSAS certifications.

This year’s theme is transparency.

Google sharing seven years worth of data center initiatives is unheard of in the data center industry where secrecy is a standard practice. As an example of this transparency, Google has shared data showing that it has improved its data center mechanical systems over the past four years, reducing the energy use in electrical and cooling systems by 42 percent.

During the third quarter of 2008, Google’s electrical and cooling systems across all of its data centers used 21 watts for every 100 watts of IT load. In the second quarter of this year, it used only 12 watts for every 100 watts of IT load. In the data center industry, we would call this a power usage effectiveness of 1.12.

After seven years of data center development, Google shared its vision of modular, cost-effective designs that reduce the lead times to deliver data center capacity. Six years ago, it took 16 months for Google to build its data center in Atlanta. Now, Google can react much more quickly as buildings are built to add capacity at rates measured in months not years.

The inside of the data center looks like no other, as Google has prioritized being flexible and efficient while basing its total costs of ownership for IT over a life cycle as short as seven years. This is the accounting depreciation schedule for capex to build data centers and IT hardware, and takes into account operational expenditures. It is not uncommon for legacy data centers to have a life cycle that corresponds to the depreciation of the data center building at 27 years. Google is updating its data center mechanical infrastructure in the same way a manufacturer wants the latest tooling to support production innovation.

One of the most surprising statements in another presentation by a data center provider at the conference was how low the premium for renewable energy is, yet no customers have chosen the option when presented with it. Yet Google, in thinking long-term, has made the choice to be carbon-neutral, share its efficiency best practices and make it a priority to have a sustainability strategy.

Kava’s presentation had more than 45 slides and went into a deep dive about cooling systems and water use. If you are interested in these topics, here is a post on how Google determined pumps are more efficient than fans. Here is one on the range of water sources Google uses to cool its data centers.

Google has made one of the most significant efforts to change the data center industry by embracing transparency as part of its data center strategy.

Dave Ohara is a GigaOm Pro Analyst, covering data centers, cloud and Big Data. You can read his latest research on GigaOM Pro, and also follow him on his blog and on Twitter at @greenm3.

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The seawater-cooled data center is unusual even for Google, a pioneer of experimental technology, which builds its own servers, experiments with making solar thermal receivers and created a subsidiary to buy and sell energy on the wholesale electricity markets. To create the seawater-cooled data center, Google bought a former paper mill in Finland in 2009, and set out to use the building’s massive quarter-mile long seawater tunnels to push water up into the building to cool a data center. The paper mill cooled some of its previous manufacturing systems with the seawater tunnels (and other industries have been known to do this), but up until now it’s basically unheard of to use seawater for data center cooling.

The seawater system uses complex filtration systems (it’s dirty seawater after all) made out of titanium plates, which don’t corrode as fast as other materials from the salty water. But the system needs to be able to be cleaned (as it does corrode every once in a while) without it going offline, which is something Kava said Google worked hard to implement. It’s a tricky feat to clean a system while also operating it, and it’s something companies in different industries (that aren’t responsible for powering crucial websites) don’t generally have to do (even nuclear plants get shut down for weeks for cleaning).

The heat transfer units are the heart of the cooling system, and the seawater pumps into the heat transfer system, cools the data center, and then the water itself is cooled slightly before being pumped back out to sea. Google wanted the water that was pumped back out to sea to be similar in temperature to the water that entered the system, as to have as little impact as possible on the surrounding ecosystem. “It was the right thing to do,” says Kava. Google also did extensive thermal modelling to study the tides, plant life, and seasons over a 30-year-period of the surrounding coastal area, and this information determined where the water should come in and out of the system, also to have as little environmental impact as possible.

While the seawater-system has a bit of a cool-factor, it also seemed like it was a labor of love, and something that Google isn’t advocating as a standard solution for data centers for everyone. If it was a smaller scale system, it might not have been economical, said Kava, who also added that the economics do work out because the data center is of a large enough size. Beyond that, the location of the building — on the water and in the right climate — was a rather uncommon find, and could be hard to recreate in other locations.

I asked Kava and Google’s Chris Malone if the information learned from the seawater-cooled data center might inform some speculated plans for a floating modular data center (powered by waves no less). But Malone had no comment on those speculative projects.

Given the seawater data center isn’t yet serving live traffic — but is in the testing phase — Google doesn’t know the exact PUE (a widely used efficiency metric) of it yet. Kava says it will likely be in the 1.1 or 1.2 range — really good. Google will also be detailing two other energy-efficient data centers in Europe on Tuesday — one in Ireland and one in Belgium — that don’t use chillers, but use outside air and evaporative cooling.

Google has been on the forefront of data center energy efficiency design, and as Yahoo and Facebook start to show of data center efficiency designs, too, a healthy competition has emerged.

To learn more about Google’s data center innovations, come to our Structure Event on June 22 and 23rd in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Nesiangirl.

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