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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
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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.
Actually, they leave it in the rack and mark it offline. Only when a large number of servers are history do they bother taking out the trash. That's the glory of well-managed commodity hardware!
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.
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.
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Actually, donations of depreciated property are not really deductible, because your deduction is limited to your basis. If the equipment is old, it's already depreciated and has no basis. See http://www.msk.com/csl_files/325861.pdf.
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...
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.
donating sounds like a great idea, till you ask a computer charity about the associated costs. I worked for a place called Computers for Africa, which as you can guess shipped old computers over to africa for schools etc. We also would give refurbished systems to anyone who came and asked. We often had local charities and similar coming.
The problem is that recycling a computer is EXPENSIVE. Shipping an old computer, specially with CRT monitors costs a lot of money. Also, people don't want to take these old clunkers off you, so you end up collecting more and more pentium II 200mhz toasters which you then have to find some way to get rid off. It's not a profitable business. Now of course people will chime in, why doesn't the gov recycle them for plastics etc? Well recycling printers/monitors is really hard to do. It's very expensive and not worth a computer charities time on the whole, if they don't want to go under from the associated cost.
All in all, we (the west) produce so much computer waste that we can't keep track of it or keep ahead of the game. With the amount of people owning a PC sky rocketing, expect to see a whole lot of sad looking computer corpses being crushed at your local dumps.
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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)
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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.
Um, he-LLO? MIT is the king of recycling. It's the home of the "reuse" list, where you can find someone to take almost *anything*. We've got student groups dedicated to rescuing ancient macs, dozens of dorm rooms filled with obsolete lab equipment, etc, etc. At MIT you really only have to put your unwanted stuff outside your door with a "reuse" sign on it and it will be snatched up. If you do this and post to the reuse mailing list, then it'll be gone within minutes. And not just electronic stuff: people regularly post food, event tickets, etc, etc, to reuse. It's magic, and a big part of MIT culture. I have to assume that you are new here (and your advisor, too). Learn a bit about MIT culture (especially undergraduate culture) before you are so quick to judge.
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> 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.
"CPUs, RAM and, maybe, storage. "
Oh, I imagine there is at least some storage involved...
Unless they cache the internet in ram
On a good day we could expect to completely shred or rehabilitate 20,000 pounds of electronics, the vast majority being CRT glass, with quite a bit of metal and plastics as well, so I suspect Google's output is not beyond a single company's capabilities. The company philosophy frowned on the idea of sending semi-obsolete equipment to third-world companies for a 'lease on life' as those companies are not really equipped for repair or disposal of dead electronics.
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