Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

miller60 writes "Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. At this month's ACM conference on large-scale computing, Google's Jeff Dean said he's working on a storage and computation system called Spanner, which will automatically allocate resources across data centers, and be designed for a scale of 1 million to 10 million machines. One goal: to dynamically shift workloads to capture cheaper bandwidth and power. Dean's presentation (PDF) is online."

Comments

Re:fastest site on the internet gets faster?

[Yvan256]

They grind them up and feed them to new servers and then serve you zombie content with those.

Re:Pretty soon...

[mi]

Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.

At least, we aren't going to have to go through the pains of upgrading to IPv6 in that case... 2^32 covers 10 million like bull covers a rabbit...

Re:Pretty soon...

[decipher_saint]

That's the plan, I thought:
1. Cache all websites
2. Cache all users
3. Disconnect the meat beings

Oop, said too much!

Re:Disposal?

[Tynin]

They use Tigerdirect as a front company to push their failing and half broken computers and peripherals back out onto the market. (tongue-in-cheek)

Re:fastest site on the internet gets faster?

[mcgrew]

Soylent Blue?

Boorgle

[Toe, The]

It's pronounced Boorgle... and resistance is futile.

new ad campaign?

[cashman73]

They should put that on their website,... before long it'll be: "Google: Billions and Billions of Servers." Of course, McDonald's just might have a problem with that,...

Enough?

[rwv]

1981: 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

2009: 10 Million servers ought to be enough for any company.

Re:The NSA has Google beat...

[Red Flayer]

Emphasis mine (parent's emphasis discarded)

At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Stupid non-standard unit. According to the official Salt Lake City Energy Blueprint, SLC has an annual electricity usage of 3.3 billion kWh, of which 17% is residential. This works out to 64 MW, or about 6 POOTs (Power Output of Togo), which is the accepted standard non-standard unit for power in this order of magnitude.

Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Assuming that they are referring to area, and not volume -- the Alamodome is about 40,000 square meters... the standard non-standard unit for area of this magnitude is American football fields (NOT random stadia) including endzones, which is 5351 square meters -- thus this data archive will be approximately 7+ football fields.

Now, if only the NSA released their specs in terms of Libraries of Congress....

Yes, it would be interesting to know how much data they will be storing in this facility.

But, sheesh, I understand not wanting to use standard units as they may just confuse the scientifically illiterate... but if the NSA or some other source is going to use non-standard units, they should at least use standard non-standard units like POOTs or football fields.