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Where Does Google's Hardware Go to Die?
An anonymous reader asks: "I was talking with a co-worker today about how Google is so big, and how they make such great use of commodity hardware to do their business, and one of the topics that came up is what Google does with its old hardware. Google has been around for many years now, they have more machines than any sane person would own, and they are continually expanding. At some stage they have to push out old equipment, either when it starts entering into its MTBF limits or it's been depreciated down. Searching (using Google of course) wasn't particularly fruitful. Has anyone seen where Google's hardware goes when it dies?"
/dev/null
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I'm guessing that if its actually *DEAD*, they throw it out [read: some lucky employee gets a dead server to putz with], otherwise they probably keep using it in some form or another.
Video Production Support
Well at least once its dead...
As most reckon that Google does no evil!
Short of that, I dunno, maybe they go to Valhalla, heofan, paradisum, or they join a heap of rubbish in China.
Seriously I'm sure it would depend on what dies. A disk drive would get thrown and replaced, a motherboard frying is more serious (but of course you can rescue the memory and media). The nice thing about scaling out rather than up is that as newer hardware comes along you don't need to replace the old stuff; so why through something out unless it's dead beyond recovery, in which case it's useless to anyone and off to the recycler it goes.
When companies are so big such as Google they can't simply throw away their equipment. Probably they're donating the working hardware to schools or communities. Donations are tax deductible in the US, so they're actually saving money while getting free positive publicity.
As for the broken machines, there are companies that make money off getting old hardware from businesses and recycling raw materials, so I think Google is doing the same. Here in europe there are high fines if you're caught throwing polluting stuff (electronic device are filled with polluting materials) without disposing of them properly, and I don't think in the US the law is very different from here.
Most of the old hardware gets sold to MSN and Yahoo. Really old hardware gets sold to MS for use on .Net dev boxes. The newer stuff gets sold to MS for MSN search, but that's only if they have 640k of memory.
In the words of a googler: We buy crap.
I'm willing to bet that once the hardware is too crappy for Google, that it's completely useless for anyone remotely sane.
Look for completely broken hardware at recycling places.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Probably the most annoying issue they have with failing hardware, is new versions of the used components, causing incompatility with the old hardware components and the operating system. I imagine they try to keep it running as long as possible by shipping broken machines to a central location and use parts of those to keep the datacenters as coherent as possible. So a setup like one datacenter runs generation-5 years, 2 run generation-4years, 3 run current. This way you can at one moment decide to update a complete datacenter instead of hundreds of machines spread across several datacenters.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
as opposed to slashdot? One may have a clue, the other can make beowulf cluster jokes. Which do you prefer?
Monstar L
The guys from the Wayback Machine come round and archive it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
but running an IT recycling company in the UK, you've just give a great idea! *g*
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Seriously, think about it. As long as it doesnt break down, the machine can still get search/indexing/crawling jobs, or take over part of the distributed storage network. Its already installed, its working, and even if its slower than the others, the system google is using doesnt really depend on individual machine speed.
And after it broke down, they are going to dispose them, i guess.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I'm sorry, but used is used. I don't know about you, but around here we have local recyclers.
In fact, we've all been secretly buying used stuff from them for years.
I think it is an absolutely horrid thing of current American society that so many people always run after new stuff and never even bother to think about others when dumping old stuff. I've seen companies trash hundreds of computers (yes, actually trash them... because the HDD has sensitive data and because of taxes). I think that this should somehow be stopped. One way would be to heavily charge for the disposal of things containing lead, and remove all taxes for donations of educational supplies to needy institutions within the US or abroad.
That way, companies can do a good zeroing of their hard drive and then send off the PC to an organization that will take it to Africa, India, China, or somewhere else with a shortage of computers. Seriously, kids in Africa who have never touched a computer before would really be able to make use of a lot of thrown-out pentium-1, 90mhz systems. It's not funny that US society just trashes this stuff. It's such a wasteful thing to do in this world.
My supervisor (remaining unnamed) had a laboratory cleanup and hesitated throwing away anything - he almost put a cordless phone in the trash before I had to grab it out of his hands! The thing has lead in it, and for gods sake works! Some poor kid could use that thing in this world, and not everyone is as rich as he is to be throwing away a working phone! They also threw out this giant heavy "Communications Biophysics" plastic poster. I had to yank that out of facilities because it is recyclable. (Welcome to MIT. I wish people recycled more and thought about the world a little more here before they ran around inventing stuff.)
You have to watch what you donate and give away to employees. You want to give away equipment that can still be maintained in a usable state. Once, I had to get rid of a bunch of obsolete monitors, and a group of employees were actively requesting them. Instead, I donated them to an Electrical Engineering professor at a local college. He tested each of them before doing anything with them. One caught on fire and caused a serious mess. Big problem! The Electrical Engineering professor was skilled (and ready) for this sort of thing, so it was okay in the end. If I gave these monitors to employees, their houses could have burned down!!!
Lesson: If you give untrained employees or volunteer organizations equipment, make sure it works! Sure you can give the stuff away with a "no guarantees" label. However, your employees are still expecting "safe" equipment that reasonably works. Unless you are confident that you are giving away "good" kit, only send the equipment to trained professionals.
My brother-in-law is a buyer for a company here in Australia, which buys massive lots of older computers and parts to sell to India, Malaysia, etc - countries that need a lot of hardware for their growing number of call centres, etc, but can't afford current-generation equipment. There's a pretty big market for working older machines. I'd guess that Google would sell their old hardware to someone like that, or if they use equipment until it dies, they pay to have it recycled or scrapped as cleanly as possible.
Older systems can connect to newer hard drives.
for howe long, the timeline the GP indicates "you're better off using that new machine that can handle 100 times the data " is easily read as literal,
an original XT with a 20 megabyte hard drive could also take a 40.. but it wasn't ever going to work with a multi-gigabyte drive.
look backwards..
if google had been supported by XT's, 1000's of them.. and then the next wave of hardware, 20 gigabyte hard drive. came out- or, sata, or sas, or usb....
At the point when one machine can replace 10 older ones in terms of storage capacity and processor capability, I don't think you'd find the older system capable of running current 'then' spec hard drives.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I too would like to know ... where you can get an ex-google harddrive with inside details of the non-published alterations to their algorithms.
Let me know.
Thanks
Well, I heard there are 2 guys doing their phd in a garage who ask google for their old hardware..
Google has been around for many years now, they have more machines than any sane person would own
Well if that isn't the understatement of the day, I don't know what is...
Like this early rackmounted array of Google servers which was displayed at the Vintage Computer Festival in 2005 and now is (I believe) on display at the Computer History Museum (which is worth the effort to tour if you are near the Palo Alto/Mountain View California Area.
From my write-up about the rack: The rack in the picture holds 4 standard Pentium II Motherboards per level and has a total of 80 Linux (2.0) servers per rack. Since they were standard MBs they had to get creative with things such as wiring and insulation (which was, in this case, cork-board.) The panel shows the server room as well as talks about the fire dangers of doing such a design. (Google is a neighbor to the Computer History Museum BTW). (closeup)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I was fortunate enough to get a tour of the google campus once and i asked them about thier server and what they run, etc. One of the most surpising things i found out is that most of thier servers dont have cases. They do this so its super easy to swap out hardware if something dies and to perform any upgrade that may be needed. If a part dies, they can yank it out and replace it without even having to take the server out of the rack. The dead part simply get tossed in the trash and the server continues serving its merry a** off. To me that means thier servers never 'die', they just constanly get new parts and the parts that do die are so dead you wouldnt want them.
Why cant they just sale it for a fraction of what they bought it? I mean really most people don't NEED the newest greatest thing. You can hire a couple of guys who sit in a warehouse all day just testing the hardware. Then you can either format the hard drives or replace them with $20 hard drives and sale them. You could even bundle like groups of 25 computers or monitors and sale them bulk to people or companies that can't afford all new hardware. Then if your good enough at it people will come back when those go bad or to "upgrade" in 2 to 3 years and by then you would have "new" hardware. Its not about making a profit but about cutting your losses.
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Knowing Google, they probably just hand them off to a local electronics recycler.
In much the same way that you got rid of your old junk from college, young Google engineers stealthily bring the old hardware to university towns just after finals and leave the stuff with the discarded furniture.
Frat boys eventually recycle everything into shims for pool tables or anchors for their parents' boats.
Google has been transitioning to RAM-based storage. With redundant servers around the world, power outages are no problem. RAM is way faster; a disk can only do about 100 to 400 (commonly 200) seeks per second.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
the hardware never dies, it just gets taken or runs away to a farm in the country like our dogs and cats when we were kids.
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Given their existing parts-swapping policies, and the level of hardware they're using, I'd guess Google doesn't buy much NEW hardware, but rather, probably buys motherboards etc. from the various e-waste recycling outfits -- which charge about 16 cents a pound for sorted motherboards, RAM, HDs, etc. if you buy it in bulk. It only takes one entry-level employee to test such stuff to the "does it power on and boot up? Good enough!" level that is all Google really needs, given their massively-redundant setup.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
about 5 years ago, it was reported that the downturn to the W. American Economy allowed Google to skip the harddrive and switch to pure ram. Combine that with linuxbios, and you have a fairly low cost energy system that is not likely to wear out quickly as it will not use huge amounts of energy. Afterwards, they simply sell or give away the motherboards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...old hardware never dies. It remains forever in Google Cache.
I bet there's a big landfill site somewhere near Google HQ, but its probably really low resolution in Google Earth...
B
In google search, type, "Where Does Google's Hardware Go to Die?" and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button. No, seriously, do it. You will get the right answer.
If Google is still using what most hobbyists think of as "commodity", then they aren't as smart as people like to think.
I'm sure they're using some custom hardware designs by now. If they aren't, they're wasting a lot of time, energy, and manpower.
Testing and shipping computers from the first world is more expensive than buying used computers locally. Third world countries do have demand for computers, and there are companies that meet that demand at very low cost.
That explains why there are no groups soliciting donations in the US. It's better to recycle the computer and just give money to an NGO that buys computers on the local market.
...next you'll be saying there's no such thing as Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.