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How Many Google Machines, Really?
BoneThugND writes "I found this article on TNL.NET. It takes information from the S-1 Filing to reverse engineer how many machines Google has (hint: a lot more than 10,000).
'According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000. If you divide the $250 million figure from the S-1 filing by $278,000, you end up with a bit over 899 racks. Assuming that each rack holds 88 machines, you end up with 79,000 machines.'" An anonymous source claims
over 100,000.
That's $3159 per machine, and those are today's prices... They weren't so low a couple of years ago...
I don't think this is that strange: after all, that 10,000 machines figure is several years old. It's only logical that Google has expanded their facilities since then.
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Might just be me, but damn, don't you think this has raised the interested of our three letter entities? i mean, damn that is just some serious computing and indexing power on cheap, "disposable" hardware...with a filesystem that can keep track of that many machines? If i headed one of such entities, i'd sure want to know more about it!
My guess is just as your guess which would be:
your guess + 1 = my guess.
We already know they have enough servers to saturate a T1000 line so might as well stop here and talk about something more constructive.
Yes, but aside from dealing with hardware failures and other physical / logistical problems, there really isn't much of a difference between managing 45,000 computers and managing 80,000. They're both Really Big Numbers, and I'm sure whatever software they're using is scaleable enough to smoothly handle many more machines than that.
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Remember there's a little thing called "volume discount"...
It's gotta be more than that.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Doesn't google run it's own proprietary OS? Thought I read that somewhere...
That's all speculation.
Downmix - The Artscene News Source!
i thought of this too, but then i thought that they probably bought them 5/10/20 at a time as they grew.
Runnin' On Empty
Since the 10k server number was first floated, I believe google has added quite a few, meaning 6 to 10 whole new datacenters around the world.
It would only make sense that the server count would now be in the ballpart of what is mentioned here.
Google hasn't been standing still, and I've heard the "Google has 10k servers" for 1-2 years now.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Since it is known that Google has the largest installed base of Linux and now they are about to go IPO in the billions, I wonder why SCO has not gone after them? Apparently, it is not use of Linux that makes SCO persue a company.
The interesting thing is, that if SCO really has MS backing and MS is pulling strings, then I would think that MS would want SCO to persue google to tie them up for awhile.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am sort of suprised at the 250 million IPO though. Obviousy the IPO is not the value of the entire company, but the little company I work for that I bet almost nobody here has heard of, is actually worth nearly 80 times Google's IPO. Amazing how such a small company can have such a large impact.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
All those machine, all that complexity and activity, all boiled down to one little box under a Google logo. The most useful input box on the internet.
Thanks Google!
That book was written about 3 years ago.
The cost of acquiring the machine is a fraction of the cost of owning it.
And lets not forget the overhead of 2 networks per machine and all the patch panels, wiring, switches. Toss in console management (which may not be on all machines at all time), monitoring and management of said machines. Oh, and one really tired guy running around.
Disks are going to fail at a rate of several hundred or thousand PER DAY, just statistically. (along with power supplies etc)
Toss in that in three years, ALL of those machines are obsolete.
That's huge.
I've got ~300 racks in a half full data center upstairs from me. All network cables run to a room below it to patch panels. Around 50% the size of the DC is cable management. Next to that is a room FILLED with chest high batteries - these are used during outages until the generators need to be kicked on. And a NOC takes up about 1/5th the space of the DC (monitoring systems worldwide, but it's got seating for maybe 40 people - tight and usually filled with 10 folks, but in a crunch we live up there).
So that $3159 is only a bit of it. And in 3 years, all those machines will likely be replaced for whatever $3k buys then. That's about to be a 2 CPU Athlon64 box. If Sun can pull a rabbit out of its ass, we'll have 8 and 16CPU Athlon64 boxes. At least with that, some of the CPUs can talk to each other really really really fast.
If they did, there's a real chance that there could be no more Internet for a lot of applications: people would just upload their Web pages to Google, users would log on to Google to search, and most email will go through Gmail.
This is a good thing for Google, but not for the world as a whole.
Google also indexes images, newsgroups, has things like froogle, as well as the upcomming gmail. Not to mention all the research and other things they have going, on top of redundancy...
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
Sounds like a pretty stupid idea to me. Lego is expensive stuff.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Each apple requires more power than an entire house? well i guess that makes sense considering that only 1 out of 10 Virginia homes have power.
Yes, it is true. We can't exist without polluting. However, I'm willing to bet, without doing the calaulations, that the pollution you personally generate by querying google is much less than what you generate browsing slashdot on your home computer.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You don't; their Sales Director comes to you...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Getting into datacenters is trivial: Set up a shell company, and call the sales team and insist on inspecting their colo before comitting to anything. You'll get a guided tour of any hosting facility you want. Security at most hosting facilities is a joke - the CTO at a company I worked for used to spend quite a lot of time tracking down reliable hosting companies to use for our systems, and more than one place maintenance doors had been left unlooked etc.
"hard drives ... they'd require at most 3Gb (OS) + 4Gb (ramdrive backup)"
Which is why they have no problems finding space for GMail - you can't buy full size drives as small as 7Gb anymore, so they already have countless Tbs of unused drive space in their racks.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Working for a phone company, I can say that "we can" and "we do" :-)
The best way for Google to accomplish a DDOS if they _really_ wanted to would be to make every search result point to the target website. :)
Now that would be impressive...