Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Because sooner or later (with computers: mostly sooner), a new computer will do the work much faster than 10 old computers, saving a lot of money on energy, rent, support and cooling. Even if they actually work, it makes more sense to replace N older computers with one new.
c++;
You've got a good point there, especially if you think about hard drive space with Gmail. I'm sure Google will keep hold of their hard drives wherever possible to give them more space/more redundancy.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
The way hard drives have been getting cheaper and more compact, that doesn't always make economic sense. At some point the cost of storage, cooling, electricity, maintenance, etc. is too much and you're better off using that new machine that can handle 100 times the data for the same overhead costs.
If electricity, rent, air conditioners, and sysadmins were free...
Older systems can connect to newer hard drives. I don't know how much hard drives figure into this though, I think RAM size is a bigger factor so the computer knows where the data is without wasting too much time looking for it.
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 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.)
There is nothing to sell.
This whole discussion is moot as Google simply does not have computers per se, just components. There are no cases, no monitors, just motherboards, CPUs, RAM and, maybe, storage. There's no reason for video, sound, peripherals either.
All of the components would be run until they fail. They would be not usable at that point. Nor would they be counted as a "computer," only an aggregate of parts. The failed component would be replaced and the rest kept on working until some other component fails. Effectively the "computers" would be immortal, but the components would be perpetually replaced.
-- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.