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Data centers: the often-forgotten, yet utterly important behind-the-scenesters of the web. Applications like your email account, calendar and -- admit it -- YouTube collection of One Direction videos are all kept afloat by them.
Google's newest creation, Spanner, is a data center that can be distributed and replicated across the world. As Google explains it, it's "the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions."
In less jargon-y terms: Applications that use the system, like your calendar or Gmail, will be able to read data at a much faster rate.