SINGAPORE - Barely 18 months after opening its first data centre in Singapore, Google is expanding the facility to deal with a surge in data usage both domestically and globally. Here are things you should know about the search giant's data centre.
1. Located at Jurong, Singapore's data centre is one of the only two Google facilities in Asia, the other being in Taiwan
2. The Singapore facility uses 100 per cent recycled water for cooling and other critical operations, but still uses fossil fuels for its power needs.
3. It is the first multi-storey data facility while other centres in Taiwan, the US, Europe and South America are located on sprawling sites
4. The facility is crucial in helping Google manage traffic. The search giant gets more than 100 billion queries a month. Its search engine looks up information from 60 trillion Web addresses, up from one trillion in 2008.
5. While only the second in Asia to get a data centre, Singapore was the first country in South-east Asia to get Google Street View, and the fourth country in the entire Asia Pacific.
6. Google is looking for partners in Singapore with the expertise and technology to make their facilities here more environmentally friendly, and can fund such projects with community grants ranging from US$5,000 (S$6,757) to US$50,000.
7. The Jurong data centre expansion will boost efforts to transform the area into a commercial hub which will boast the new Singapore-Kuala Lumpur high-speed rail terminus
8. Google usually maintains an air of secretiveness about their data centres, but you can get an idea of how the inside looks through a Street View tour of one of its facilities in Lenoir, North Carolina.
9. No one is allowed into the room containing computer servers and storage racks. A security guard sits at the entrance and approved employees must undergo retinal scans, among other security measures, to gain access.
10. The injection of funds including facility expansion brings Google's total investment in Singapore to over half a billion US dollars
