An Inside Look at Google

I was fascinated by an article posted this week on CNet and Webware where Google gave a inside look at how their data centers work. This is a rare thing for this giant search engine company, but they did it at the Google I/O Conference held in San Francisco.

If you don't want to read the entire article (and some of the other articles linked in the story), here are some of the highlights that caught my eye:

So, how many servers does Google have? Well Google would not exactly spell that one out, but a little simple math reveals that they have well over 200,000 individual computers acting as servers. The company has 36 data centers located around the world. Each center has 150 server racks and each rack holds 40 computers.

Even Google admits that it might be an overkill, but they base their need on the assumption that every computer is expendable...in other words, they assume that so many computers are going to fail at any one time. To quote from the article:

"In each cluster's first year, it's typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will "go wonky," with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there's about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

So how many computers would you guess are involved every time you do a Google search? Would you believe 700-1,000? Remember that every time you do a search.

There is a lot more to this article and I recommend you give it a read.

Update on Firefox 3 - I went ahead and installed Firefox V3 RL1 on my laptop to see if it is as good as I am hearing...It is! It loads faster and runs noticeably faster than V.2. Am just waiting for a couple more crucial add-on's such as MacAfee Site advisor and AVG 8 to upgrade for Firefox 3.