Some of us at work were talking over lunch about Google’s servers. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of them, and it’s well-known that they’re based on commodity x86 hardware. Otherwise, they’ve been pretty secretive.<\/p>\n
The article<\/a> came out on April 1st, so many are a little doubtful about its veracity, but its seems fairly believable. Apparently, the Google machines have integrated 12V batteries in lieu of UPSs, and the servers are hosted in shipping crates.<\/p>\n The Digg conversation also makes mentions of GoogleFS<\/a>, their proprietary in-house filesystem that apparently makes it easy to stripe data across many servers. (Hadoop<\/a> is loosely an open-source version of the same, though it’s not entirely the same.)<\/p>\n Edit<\/strong>: I included the link<\/a> this time. After a while I started to doubt the veracity of this article. I’ll expand on some of my thoughts about why it seems odd in teh comments, but wanted to link to this Twitter post<\/a> that seems to confirm the veracity of this article. Note that it’s dated April 2, which makes me think there’s better than a 50\/50 shot that this is real. And this guy<\/a> is either in on the prank, or corroborates that this was actually presented at a workshop.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of us at work were talking over lunch about Google’s servers. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of them, and it’s well-known that they’re based on commodity x86 hardware. Otherwise, they’ve been pretty secretive. The article came out on … Continue reading