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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?"
> If the equipment is old, it's already depreciated and has no basis.
The only computer equipment which is old enough to be depreciated at Google would have had to have been purchased prior to 2001, since computer equipment has a 5 year depreciation schedule. As effective computer lifespans are considered three years among many IT folk, I doubt that a lot of the equipment is fully depreciated before it fails or is superceded by performance improvements. In which case, there is basis and the 21st Century Classrooms Act, signed into law as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-34, Title II B, Sec. 224) comes into play to amplify the tax deduction.
Now, this is all assuming they capitalize the computers. While that would be how many businesses would treat them, Google might expense them. Google may well treat the computers as simply aggregates of spare parts.
There seems to be an assumption that computers are not simply refurbished by replacing any failing components, or broken down for spare parts, discarding the failed components. The accounting complexities of doing such for computers under depreciation boggles my mind, but that's what computers are for.
I doubt there are much in the way of failed "computers" at Google, but a lot of failed components. The components would typically be sent to a recycling firm, which either would be paid to take them away or would pay for the components if there was value to them.
My company only deals with thousands of computers, however, once salvagable components are removed & failed components are sent to recovery, there is little left except empty cases. The plastic components of which are typically waste and the metal is sent to a metal scrap yard when there's enough.
Since I can see little reason for Google to have cases per se (versus mounting brackets for raw components), I could easily imagine that Google doesn't have "computers" per se, but aggregates of motherboards, CPUs, RAM and storage. (If storage is shared, then not even that.)
So, this whole discussion may be moot as Google may simply not have computers per se, just components.
-- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.
I toured google during summer 2006 while on vacation. An old high school friend is an employee, and my family got a private tour. I was able to examine one of these racks up close. I took this photo in the main lobby where we got our security badges. Here's some of the more interesting features:
1) The motherboards are insulated from the rack by a sheet of cork board.
2) The back of the rack is covered by an array of generic case fans all connected with zip-ties.
3) They all used slot-1 pentium2 processors.
I wasn't allowed to take pictures of the real stuff. Security is insanely paranoid. Even my children had to sign nda's to get their security passes.
My kids were more impressed with the foosball tables, and the free food and drinks located just about everywhere.