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A Glimpse Inside Google's South Carolina Data Center

Posted by timothy on from the live-from-coast-zero dept.

miller60 writes "Google today released a video showcasing the security and data protection practices in its data centers. Filmed at the company's South Carolina data center, it provides a look at Google's wiping of data and (literal) shredding of hard drives."

12 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Amazon's East Coast Data Center by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Amazon also released photos of their East Coast datacenter today.

  2. I want a video of Amazon's data center by jbplou · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I want a video of Amazon's data center about 36 hours ago instead.

  3. Ultimate Security by ThePromenader · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...of course there's no better way to protect your data - my basement door is securely locked, and I shred my HD's daily. And mom rarely lets anyone past the front door.

    --

    No, no sig. Really.

    ThePromenader
  4. Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Call every data recovery company you can find and ask them the following:

    "I have a hard drive which was zeroed out, with one pass, accidentally. Can you recover the data for me?"

    You will not find a single "yes" answer. It's impossible. It's a myth, or a theoretical attack.

    Maybe the CIA should worry about stuff like this, but you shouldn't, and Google really shouldn't. Those hard drives could be reused or recycled.

    1. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by chebucto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're only being discarded because they've started to fail. So giving them away would be a bit of a dick move, regardless of whether it's a privacy threat or not.

      As for the shredding, my bet would be that they're just following a data-destruction spec from 10-20 years ago, when wiping really wasn't a surefire way to destroy data.

      --
      The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
    2. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd be curious to know if (once a drive is dead or failing) shredding reduces its value, or whether any recycling procedure would just start with shredding anyway. A pile of shredded drive chunks should be substantially richer in copper, nickel, rare earths, aluminum, and iron(and possibly gold) than many ores considered to be commercially viable. I imagine that it comes down to whether it is cheaper to get a cleaner separation at the cost more labor, or just grind 'em up and let the refining process sort it out...

    3. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, sure. Google will just invent a hard-drive disassembling, sorting, and recycling robot. Are you fucking nuts? What's next, Google will just invent some self-driving robot car?!

    4. Re:Shredding hard drives is a pointless waste. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A very, very common failure mode for a hard drive is that it continues working until either the electronics or the mechanics of the drive fails. At this point, it's too late to zero it out.

      Now that it has failed, how does one erase it? Well, one can either try to put the platters in a new enclosure with fresh mechanics and fresh electronics...

      or one can destroy it.

      Guess which one is cheaper. :-)

  5. Re:That's nice and all. by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, hands up anyone whose privacy concerns RE:Google had to do with people stealing hard drives or breaking into datacenters, rather than Google mining them...

    You and I might not worry about that, but keep in mind Google is trying to convince government and industry to outsource much of their internal email and other IT operations to Google's servers. I'd imagine they would like to be reassured that nobody will walk in and grab their confidential data.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  6. Hard drives need upgraded by drmacinyasha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Did anyone else notice in the video at 00:53 that the guy is assembling the server... With an IDE hard drive?

    1. Re:Hard drives need upgraded by proxima · · Score: 3, Informative

      It would be a fail to think they would store anything needed on such servers, other than os. The servers are probably linked to a harddrive farm by network or fiber-channel.

      Wrong. Google stores its data all over the place, including on each individual server. They designed their own networked filesystem for the purpose. If they really didn't store data locally, they'd almost certainly PXE boot and avoid drives on each server altogether. I suspect the video just used some dated footage (from a training or other internal video perhaps?), as this article clearly shows SATA drives. Every server has two drives, and since no one node is critical for anything they also wouldn't bother with RAID1 for an OS boot drive as you suggest.

      --
      "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
  7. Re:That's nice and all. by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Data center robberies are actually rather common, so physical attackers should definitely be pretty high up on the list. A google search for "data center robbery" turns up tons of results. One particularly bad offender is C I Host, who had their data center broken into four times in three years. At least one of those times, someone cut through the wall of the datacenter to gain access. Other times, well, it turns out that pointing a gun at someone is a rather good way to get around all that fancy security.