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

The New Mainframe

[AKAImBatman]

Most people buy computers one at a time, but Google thinks on a very different scale. Jimmy Clidaras revealed that the core of the company's data centers are composed of standard 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers each, with many containers in each data center.

Mainstream servers with x86 processors were the only option, he added. "Ten years ago...it was clear the only way to make (search) work as free product was to run on relatively cheap hardware. You can't run it on a mainframe. The margins just don't work out," he said.

I think Google may be selling themselves short. Once you start building standardized data centers in shipping containers with singular hookups between the container and the outside world, you've stopped building individual rack-mounted machines. Instead, you've begun building a much larger machine with thousands of networked components. In effect, Google is building the mainframes of the 21st century. No longer are we talking about dozens of mainboards hooked up via multi-gigabit backplanes. We're talking about complete computing elements wired up via a self-contained, high speed network with a combined computing power that far exceeds anything currently identified as a mainframe.

The industry needs to stop thinking of these systems as portable data centers, and start recognizing them for what they are: Incredibly advanced machines with massive, distributed computing power. And since high-end computing has been headed toward multiprocessing for some time now, the market is ripe for these sorts of solutions. It's not a "cloud". It's the new mainframe.

Re:Hey google, want to save some money?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Google claims they did the math and found it was cheaper with commodity hardware. I advise everyone else to do the same and run the calculations for themselves to determine the optimal hardware for their particular load. With out the specifics of their situation, its difficult to criticize in an intelligent fashion, other than a more generalized statement expressing surprise at their configuration.

Re:Onboard UPS not new

[geekoid]

A patent is an implementation of an idea.

You can have the idea of how to put an UPS in a computer one way, and I can do it another way and both be valid patents.

I do know this gets abused, and companies try to sue becasue it's there 'idea', but that's ot how it works.

If you find a different way to do a hard drive plugin board, then yes you can patent it. I would advise you only do it if it's better in some way, and there is a demand.