Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Many Google Machines, Really?

Posted by timothy on from the measured-by-weight-not-by-volume dept.

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.

3 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. IPO changes things by Have+Blue · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was an article recently about how Google constantly understates various statistics about itself to mislead potential competitors. This article also said that the SEC would not allow them to do this once they became a publically traded company.

  2. Re:What a waste by phoxix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you've ever read a white paper of Google's, you'd realize that they even tell people why they deal with massive clusters over mainframes: lower latency.

    Sunny Dubey

  3. Re:$278k ?? by Gilk180 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really doubt they are spending anywhere near this for the machines themselves. A former student a google employee made one of those recruiting/marketing visits to my university last semester. I got to speek to him at length about Google's operation. According to him (and he had pictures to back this up). All of their boxen are a motherboard, an ide drive and a processor sitting on a shelf in the rack. No cases, no fans, no cd, etc. Plus they buy in bulk and get good prices.