Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

Posted by kdawson on from the up-scale dept.

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."

4 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty soon... by El_Smack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.

    --


    There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
  2. Re:10 Million Servers To Serve The Planet by daveime · · Score: 2, Insightful

    640 servers ought to be enough for anybody.

    Seriously though, even if everyone did have an internet connection, that's 679 people per server.

    I've seen 679 open httpd processes bring the best servers to their knees.

    Not to mention 679 simultaneous database connections, especially as most of them are serving SELECT '%pr0n%' FROM results ORDER BY pagerank ASC LIMIT N,20

    Even with a 2TB hard disk, that's only 3GB storage per person.

    I think for Google to "be the cloud", they'll need a tad more than 10 million servers.

  3. Re:The Internet isn't that big. by lordandmaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd hazard a guess that google gets a tad more connections than archive.org

  4. Re:10 Million? by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many beads do I need to string on my abacus before it becomes slef-aware?

    --
    Free Martian Whores!