Google Reveals "Secret" Server Designs

Hugh Pickens writes "Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Sun Microsystems, but Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. For the first time, Google revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference this week about data center efficiency. Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. 'This is much cheaper than huge centralized UPS,' says Google server designer Ben Jai. 'Therefore no wasted capacity.' Efficiency is a major financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: 'We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency.' Google has patents on the built-in battery design, 'but I think we'd be willing to license them to vendors,' says Urs Hoelzle, Google's vice president of operations. Google has an obsessive focus on energy efficiency. 'Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query,' says Hoelzle. 'We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.'"

Comments

Patents & Catch-22

[eldavojohn]

From 2007, the modular data center patent (where the bottommost image of the article comes from). There's no lack of patents revealing piece by piece how their power management setup works.

Ah, the catch--22 of the patent--being forced to reveal your hand in order to protect it while underpaid workers at Baidu figure out how to integrate your ideas into their hardware.

Re:Patents & Catch-22

[dfenstrate]

Ah, the catch--22 of the patent--being forced to reveal your hand in order to protect it while underpaid workers at Baidu figure out how to integrate your ideas into their hardware.

That's not a catch-22, that's the point. In exchange for everyone learning from what you've done, you get society's protection for a limited number of years.

Also, the workers at Baidu are not underpaid- if they where, they'd leave for better oppurtunities. The workers in question have obviously decided they're better off making stuff for google- they don't need your 'superior' judgement to tell them they should go back to subsistenance farming or melting hazardous materials for precious metals in their homes.

A decision to work, or not to work, and to hire, or not to hire, are based on realistic alternatives, not what some westerner sitting at a keyboard 9,000 miles away thinks is best.

Onboard UPS not new

[Y2K is bogus]

The in-computer onboard UPS is not a new idea. I don't see how they could have gotten any patents on it since I used it have one of these (my day might still). The device I saw had a gel cell mounted on an 8-bit ISA card, full length. It had +5/12v pass through connectors for powering the drives and it powered the computer through the main bus. There was more logic to it, as it had some monitoring capabilities too.

What's next, patenting a hard drive on a plugin board? Been there, it was called the Hard Card and put a 20mb HDD in an 8 bit full length ISA slot, a truly neat idea for upgrading old XT computers back in the day. You could make them work with AT computers too by putting a regular disk controller, without a drive connected, on the bus too and the BIOS would see the XT controller and boot from it.

Re:The New Mainframe

[es330td]

You forget that fault tolerance is not of utmost importance to Google. I read an article somewhere that said, in essence, that since these are search results, and not financial transactions it is okay if some parts of the overall network don't know everything that every network knows. Having access to 95% (or 99%) of the data is still acceptable in the search world.