Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Google Platform

[peter fisk]

Some info on Google's infrastructure from Wikipedia:

"Though the numbers are not publicly known, some people estimate that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, with major centers in Mountain View, California; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Herndon, Virginia; Lenoir, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Dublin, Ireland; Saint-Ghislain, Belgium; Zürich, Switzerland; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China;[1][2] and new facilities constructed in The Dalles, Oregon."

"Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. The goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per dollar, not absolute performance. Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges."

"Most of the software stack that Google uses on their servers was developed in-house. It is believed that C++, Java and Python are favored over other programming languages."

[hdservers]

Before they went public they used to run case-less mobo on card board setup arranged in a grid at their mountain view datacenter. I saw a picture of it before and if I can find it again I'll post it.

[Red Squirrel]

That's pretty neat. It's actually nice to see a large company actually using Linux and C++. Seems lot of big corporations are scared of Linux and want to go with the M$ expensive alternatives, and if they even do any custom code, it's all .net stuff.

Now an even cooler project is if they found a way to generate their own power for their servers and go green (not to mention save lot of money!).

[orexsolutions]

In Mountain View, they have one of their original racks on display. Also, if you look for news stories around April of this year, you can find a lot of information about their custom power supplies and pictures of one of the servers. It looks very custom. (I can't post any links because of my lack of message counts)