“If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest — you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina….
“Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor….
“[Afterward] I feel almost levitated by my peek inside Google’s inner sanctum. But a few weeks later, back at the Googleplex in Mountain View, I realize that my epiphanies have limited shelf life. Google’s intention is to render the data center I visited obsolete.”
— From “Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center” by Steven Levy in Wired (October 17)
For the rest of us there’s a just-released virtual tour of the Lenoir facility, including its NASCAR-themed office decor.
Link in post is broken. Here is the correct one.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/all/
Fixed, thanks, ONSN….