WHAT IS GOOGLE SPANNER?

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. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it's the home of a Google data center.

When photos of Google's mystery "Pluto Switch" appeared on the web early last year, it seemed like something from another world -- and not just because Google called it the Pluto Switch. But as alien as the Pluto Switch may seem, it's very much a sign of where the rest of the computer networking world is moving.

Three years ago, a top Google engineer named Vijay Gill was asked what he would do if someone gave him a magic wand. Gill hesitated before answering. And when he did answer, he was coy. But he seemed to say that he would build a single system that could automatically and instantly juggle information across all of Google's data centers -- and he seemed to say that Google had already built one.

Much like the engineering team that created it, Google Spanner is something that stretches across the globe while behaving as if it's all in one place. Unveiled this fall after years of hints and rumors, it's the first worldwide database worthy of the name -- a database designed to seamlessly operate across hundreds of data centers and millions of machines and trillions of rows of information.

Steven Levy is the first reporter to ever set foot in a Google data center. And in telling the tale, he has a wonderful way of making you feel like you were there too. But as Levy points out at the end of his piece, Google still views its data center empire as one of its most important advantages over the online competition, and it's still determined to keep its latest technology hidden from rivals.

For a decade, Google has been building the networking equipment that runs its online empire in secret. Today, it's raising the curtain.

Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret, so Google czar of infrastructure Urs Hölzle rarely ventures out into the public to speak about it. Today is one of those rare days. At the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California, Hölzle is announcing that Google essentially has remade a major part of its massive internal network, providing the company a bonanza in savings and efficiency. Google has done this by brashly adopting a new and radical open-source technology called OpenFlow.