Google Goes Green in Iowa

After months of speculation, Google has confirmed that Council Bluffs, Iowa, will be the site of its latest data center, bringing around 200 jobs to the local area -- along with an influx of data center equipment, including storage gear.

Council Bluffs, which is just across the state line from Omaha, Neb., now joins the growing list of Google data centers dotted around the globe. Details of that list are still sketchy, although some estimates suggest Google has a presence in at least 16 U.S states, as well as overseas data centers in Ireland and Belgium. (See Tracking Google's IT Booty and Gettin Googly.)

Precise details about Google's technology infrastructure remain hard to come by, though the firm recently revealed how it built a repository called BigTable to store server and drive performance data. (See Google.)

BigTable is built on top of the Google File System (GFS), which is essentially the firm's storage backbone and consists of thousands of inexpensive commodity storage devices clustered to share large, multi-Gbyte files. (See Storage Gets Scattered.)

At least some of those devices will be housed at Council Bluffs, which is expected to be operational by 2009.Google also has an option to expand the 55-acre, $600 million site with an additional 1,000 acres nearby, as part of what Iowa Governor Chet Carver describes as "the Silicon Valley of the Midwest." Other big-name firms include Union Pacific Railroad, First Data, and ConAgra Foods, which all have headquarters nearby.

The decision to build in Council Bluffs also sheds some light on the notoriously secretive Google energy plans. As well as abundant hydro-electric power from the nearby Missouri river, Western Iowa also leads the U.S. in the production of renewable fuels such as Ethanol, according to local newspaper The Daily Nonpareil.

The green angle fits with initiatives for energy conservation announced this week by Urs Holzle, the company's VP of operations. Holzle, who is the reputed mastermind of Google's data center strategy, used his blog to underline the firm's commitment to going green, explaining that the search giant has set a goal of creating 50 megawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2012, enough to power 50,000 U.S. homes.

Increasingly, tech firms are pushing green strategies, with IBM pumping $1 billion into energy initiatives and storage vendors such as Copan teaming up with utilities. (See Big Blue Launches Big Green, Copan Pushes Power Savings, and Pillar Pushes Provisioning, Capacity.)

Despite its latest efforts, though, Google still needs access to abundant supplies of traditional power. The ready availability of electricity, water, and land were key factors in Google's decision to locate in Council Bluffs, according to Bob Mundt, president of the Council Bluffs Chamber of Commerce.Alternative fuels might be a factor, too. "As well as ethanol, wind energy in Iowa is becoming more and more prevalent," Mundt told Byte and Switch. "I think that [Google] will keep an open mind on all of these options to see how they best suit them."

— James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch