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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.