Peeping inside Google's data centers (pictures)

Google's data centers can be vast. This one in Council Bluffs, Iowa, has more than 115,000 square feet of room.

Google's data centers use color-coded pipes to indicate what they're used for. Pink means water headed for outside cooling towers.

Denise Harwood diagnoses an overheating CPU inside a long aisle between racks of computing gear in a Google data center.

Google's Street View tour of a North Carolina data center includes this humorous view of including a Stormtrooper and R2-D2 droid from "Star Wars."

A Google data center outside Atlanta, Ga.

Google uses huge numbers of servers, as evidenced by this long shot down one data center aisle. The colored cables are standardized across the company's data centers worldwide so their function is clearer.

Antennas such as this one receive satellite communications signals used to pipe TV into homes subscribing to the Google Fiber broadband service.

These are the water tanks and cooling towers for Google's data center in Saint Ghislain, Belgium.

Google's data center at Lenoir, N.C.

Google's data center in Pryor, Okla.

Transparent plastic curtains keep the cool air around servers in a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Hard drives that fail are wiped then destroyed on site. Here's a pile of some that were spiked by the Google procedure.

The U-bend on these insulated pipes provides wiggle room for expansion and contraction as temperatures change.

Google employees use bicycles to get around their data centers.