[Chalnoth]

Just thought some people here might find this interesting. Google's been really tight-lipped about their datacenters for a while, but recently published a fair amount of information, including street-view imagery of one of their datacenters:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/...side-look.html

[Grall]

Fourteen short years to go from a set of ten disks in a cabinet made out of duplo (!!) to one of the largest corporations in the world. Pretty effin crazy.

I myself was a die-hard altavista user back when I first started hearing about google, I'd been using them since forever basically, never really liked yahoo. Google? What the hell kind of weird name's that? I'm not going to bother! *curmudgeonly shake with the fist* However, at that time, altavista like many other sites at that time were getting increasingly bogged down and cluttered with "pretty" graphics and "useful features", so one day I got sort of fed up and decided to try google. I typed in the URL, saw the clean page presented...and never looked back.

Where's altavista today? Deader than...dead. Is the site still up? I don't even know, I haven't bothered checking for like half a decade maybe.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Grall

Fourteen short years to go from a set of ten disks in a cabinet made out of duplo (!!) to one of the largest corporations in the world. Pretty effin crazy.

I myself was a die-hard altavista user back when I first started hearing about google, I'd been using them since forever basically, never really liked yahoo. Google? What the hell kind of weird name's that? I'm not going to bother! *curmudgeonly shake with the fist* However, at that time, altavista like many other sites at that time were getting increasingly bogged down and cluttered with "pretty" graphics and "useful features", so one day I got sort of fed up and decided to try google. I typed in the URL, saw the clean page presented...and never looked back.

Where's altavista today? Deader than...dead. Is the site still up? I don't even know, I haven't bothered checking for like half a decade maybe.

One of the things they mentioned in the article was that Google is now also a pretty major computer hardware manufacturer....just for stuff that they build for their own datacenters! I do wonder if someday Google will start selling their hardware...

[tongue_of_colicab]

With their nexus line of products they already sell their own hardware Well, they have others build it for them but I don't think they have their own factory for their server related hardware either.

I suppose their server hardware is pretty specific, specially designed for what google needs most? I wonder how suited they would be for other customers tasks. I guess if you are running your own search engine it might be

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by tongue_of_colicab

With their nexus line of products they already sell their own hardware Well, they have others build it for them but I don't think they have their own factory for their server related hardware either.

This is true! But I did mean, though obviously didn't say, server hardware. With their purchase of Motorola, they're now even manufacturing some of those things in-house (though obviously it will be quite a while before any new products designed under Google's ownership will be put out...and these aren't Nexus products...).

Originally Posted by tongue_of_colicab

I suppose their server hardware is pretty specific, specially designed for what google needs most? I wonder how suited they would be for other customers tasks. I guess if you are running your own search engine it might be

I imagine so. But I strongly suspect that most any company that wants to manage large server farms would want to use very similar technology. That said, perhaps some of their hardware infrastructure is particularly peculiar to their software infrastructure, Borg and MapReduce, so that it wouldn't be useful to firms that use other computing solutions.

[Davros]

Looks like there is skullduggery afoot
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2012/10/...nter_images63/

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Grall

Where's altavista today? Is the site still up?

Mhm, here.

http://www.altavista.com/



Hmm, actually looks quite decent, just searched for Radeon 7970 in Images field and the appearance of results looks better than in google.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Davros

Looks like there is skullduggery afoot
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2012/10/...nter_images63/

Doesn't much surprise me. Makes it sound like there was probably something on the other side of the rack that they didn't want to be made public...

[Ethatron]

Occam: The other side looked like crap.

[Grall]

Probably untidy-looking bundles of network cables coming out of the rear end of the opposite row of server racks...

[Blazkowicz]

Too bad, I would have liked that. But, you still have to wonder which way it really is, as shown on picture or with server's ends reversed, it makes or breaks your cooling.
If servers are all facing each other, and showing their asses to other servers, then you get cool corridors and warm corridors, with the room's air intakes and outtakes planned that way. Isn't that popular in modern times?

Maybe they took the row of racks with the most amount of servers lit up. In particular the first three columns are fully lit, so the picture looks good, then many columns have one or more servers turned off.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Grall

Probably untidy-looking bundles of network cables coming out of the rear end of the opposite row of server racks...

Possibly. Though my understanding is that all of the connections are on the front side, as this is a hot aisle where people generally don't go. I don't know what else might have made the one side look ugly, though. Perhaps it was as simple as a few missing servers because one of the rows hadn't been filled yet.