computerworld.co.nz— A brief article about how Google has decided to build their own, cheaper yet less reliable servers and lets the software handle any issues.
Jul 9, 2006View in Crawl 4
Google has always been notoriously tight lipped about both it%u2019s technologies and future expansion and business plans, so when a spokesperson claims their power supplies are 90% more efficient or whatever than the other guys%u2019, it might be more than a little exaggerated for competitive reasons. Fending off potential competitors is a big part of their strategy and scaring away entrants with claims of unmatchable, superior technology fits right in to that mode.I mention this because earlier this year it was widely reported the company was in the process of finishing up construction of data center, about the size of an average supermarket (34,000 square feet), but yet so power intensive it had to be built in the middle of nowhere, on the banks of a big river (for cooling) where electricity rates are some of the cheapest in North America.From the article %u2013"All I know is the location has to do with the power station and cooling water supply in close proximity, suggesting that this thing is really big and incredibly power-hungry," Enderle said.You%u2019d think by reducing server power demand by some 90%, they might gain some leeway in location choices, but apparently they%u2019re just as stuck as MS and Yahoo etc when it comes to plant placement. - js.
About 6 years ago, Google's colocated east coast server farm was right next to my company's cage at our local data center. We were always so jealous that they had literally a thousand servers running in the amount of space that we had about 20. Those little 1-rack-unit boys made everyone jealous--to the point that we even got in touch with the company that made them, only to be shocked at how much they were charging for the novelty of a small server. I can only imagine that someone at Google (who is now probably a VP) did the math on how much money they were losing by paying the middle man and how much cheaper it would be to hire a couple of college dropouts to build 'em out at the Googleplex.
I recently attended a conference with the Google Open Source Director. He will state specifically that Google's servers run on Linux (though I'm sure it's a customized build for their purposes). I know he said Google's desktops internally also run a customized version of Ubuntu (though they also run Windows and OSX obviously). As for the software powering their fault tolerance and scalability, who knows. It may or may not need a distributed filesystem, or could be a very scalable DB backend (almost certainly). I know I read some time ago that Google uses RAM as a temporary filesystem. It speeds up query processing and doesn't need to keep state because of other redundancies if there is a system crash.
Conversion efficiency is one point, consumption is another. Do they choose a processor based on it's energy consumption per instruction cycle? Is the whole computer optimized for power savings?There is so little technical information in this article. Maybe it would make more sense to locate the servers someplace where you don't need air conditioning like outside in a cold climate zone. Wow, I just saved a lot of electricity because I don't need AC since I moved to Alaska!
jacksprattsJul 10, 2006
Google has always been notoriously tight lipped about both it%u2019s technologies and future expansion and business plans, so when a spokesperson claims their power supplies are 90% more efficient or whatever than the other guys%u2019, it might be more than a little exaggerated for competitive reasons. Fending off potential competitors is a big part of their strategy and scaring away entrants with claims of unmatchable, superior technology fits right in to that mode.I mention this because earlier this year it was widely reported the company was in the process of finishing up construction of data center, about the size of an average supermarket (34,000 square feet), but yet so power intensive it had to be built in the middle of nowhere, on the banks of a big river (for cooling) where electricity rates are some of the cheapest in North America.From the article %u2013"All I know is the location has to do with the power station and cooling water supply in close proximity, suggesting that this thing is really big and incredibly power-hungry," Enderle said.You%u2019d think by reducing server power demand by some 90%, they might gain some leeway in location choices, but apparently they%u2019re just as stuck as MS and Yahoo etc when it comes to plant placement. - js.
lardiebJul 10, 2006
Wrong place
sonofagunnJul 10, 2006
Looks like the same article that the summary is talking about.
nafistoJul 10, 2006
About 6 years ago, Google's colocated east coast server farm was right next to my company's cage at our local data center. We were always so jealous that they had literally a thousand servers running in the amount of space that we had about 20. Those little 1-rack-unit boys made everyone jealous--to the point that we even got in touch with the company that made them, only to be shocked at how much they were charging for the novelty of a small server. I can only imagine that someone at Google (who is now probably a VP) did the math on how much money they were losing by paying the middle man and how much cheaper it would be to hire a couple of college dropouts to build 'em out at the Googleplex.
durinthalJul 10, 2006
Some people digg it as a sort of bookmark so they can come back later and read it when it's back up.
dougal1985Jul 10, 2006
Interesting article. I just submitted this story to Digg, maybe of interest to some folks who read this: <a class="user" href="http://digg.com/hardware/How_many_servers_does_Google_have">http://digg.com/hardware/How_many_servers_does_Google_have</a>I did have a document on my hard drive about how the Google software is set up to deal with redundancy, and about the queries/dollar thing, but I can't find it at the moment.
krondorJul 10, 2006
I recently attended a conference with the Google Open Source Director. He will state specifically that Google's servers run on Linux (though I'm sure it's a customized build for their purposes). I know he said Google's desktops internally also run a customized version of Ubuntu (though they also run Windows and OSX obviously). As for the software powering their fault tolerance and scalability, who knows. It may or may not need a distributed filesystem, or could be a very scalable DB backend (almost certainly). I know I read some time ago that Google uses RAM as a temporary filesystem. It speeds up query processing and doesn't need to keep state because of other redundancies if there is a system crash.
boilerbotsJul 11, 2006
Conversion efficiency is one point, consumption is another. Do they choose a processor based on it's energy consumption per instruction cycle? Is the whole computer optimized for power savings?There is so little technical information in this article. Maybe it would make more sense to locate the servers someplace where you don't need air conditioning like outside in a cold climate zone. Wow, I just saved a lot of electricity because I don't need AC since I moved to Alaska!