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

No way

[flyingfsck]

Greater than 99.9% efficiency? They likely made a mistake in their measurements.

Re:The New Mainframe

[DerekLyons]

I don't know which 80's you lived through, but mainframe processing was alive and well in the 80's I lived through. Minicomputers were a joke back then, and were seen as mostly a way to play video games. (With a smattering of spreadsheet and word processing here and there.) In the 90's, PCs started to take hold. They took over the word processing and spreadsheet functionality of the mainframe helper systems. (Anybody here remember BTOS? No? Damn. I'm getting old.)

I don't know what 80's you lived through either. Here in the real world, minicomputers of various stripes were used for a large variety of computational tasks. They were far too expensive to be used for just video games. By the late 80's they were supplanted by workstations, which were themselves supplanted by PC's in the 90's.
 
Meanwhile, mainframes continued to handle the tasks that mini's, workstations, and PC's couldn't.
 
 

Note that this didn't retire the mainframe despite public impressions. It only caused a number of bridge solutions to pop up. It was the rise of the World Wide Web that led to a general shift toward PC server systems over mainframes. All we're doing now is reinventing the mainframe concept in a more modern fashion that supports multimedia and interactivity.

Here in real world, mainframes continue chugging along handling the tasks that mini's, workstations, and PC's can't. You confuse the small corner of the computing world that is the 'net with the whole of the computing world.