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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.
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.
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.
as opposed to slashdot? One may have a clue, the other can make beowulf cluster jokes. Which do you prefer?
Monstar L
There's no such place as silicon heaven! You don't get little calculators with wings playing harps .. etc
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*
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
aww smeg, Cat get Kryten out of here before he blows another head... (im gonna kill you Rimmer!)
Of course there is. In fact, all the calculators are female and they fly upside-down with the number "58008" on their screens.
Godless heathen.
Here Timbatwe, Google sent you a computer! Let's plug it in to the... oh.
Too cool! Very, very creative. Spit and bailing wire blade servers! This is why I can't hate Google, they really are stone cold geeks who made good. Who else but a geek would build something like that!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"CPUs, RAM and, maybe, storage. "
Oh, I imagine there is at least some storage involved...
Unless they cache the internet in ram
I've seen toasters with wings though... I wonder if they were running Java?
I bet there's a big landfill site somewhere near Google HQ, but its probably really low resolution in Google Earth...
B