According to news.com, Google Fellow Jeff Dean, at the Google I/O Conference took the opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Google Data Centers and gave an enlightening sneak peak into Google data center operations. Google has 36 data centers across the globe. Google keeps 40 servers in each rack, where Google has 150 racks per data center. Google never really reveals its server arsenal, but Jeff can safely and logically assume that with 150 racks per data center, it would be anywhere in the vicinity of more than 200,000 servers and increasing.

Dean said at the conference, “Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable. You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day."

With the release of such overwhelming facts, users at the Webmaster World registered several posts on this topic.

Here are a few interesting excerpts from that thread:

“For some time now, the number tossed around in many informed speculations has been 500,000 servers. Since this 200,000 is also one reporter’s speculation and not any official word from Google, I’m still more inclined toward the 500,000 number.”

“With world population at 6,671,200,860, if Google has a half million servers — that’s one server for every 13,342 people.

Since there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and a query can be processed in a -1/2 second, that would mean the hardware could handle all queries if every person on the planet did 12.95 searches every 1/2 second, all day, every day.

Math:
6,671,200,860 / 500,000 = 13,342.4017
60 * 60 * 24 = 86,400
86,400 * 2 = 172,800
172,800 / 13,342 = 12.9515815

That doesn’t take into account the number of people who aren’t online, don’t own or know how to use a computer, the 39% of people who use something other than Google for search, newborns, infants, people in comas…

I know, that also doesn’t account for using some of the servers for crawling, building indexes, running Adwords / Adsense, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc… and of course using more than a few of the servers to handle their Accounts Receivables and payroll processing.

I’d be more impressed to hear they had less servers.”

“Let’s look at a new Google data center and see how far out 200,000 servers really is…

Lenoir, NC is 100,000 sq ft - let’s assume that they can fit just 5000 racks in there (which seems low) and let’s assume that 2U is used instead of 1U. You have space for around 100,000 servers in that one data center. Google is reported to have 36 centers worldwide - some will be much smaller than this but I’d be amazed if there weren’t already close to a million machines under their control.

We have to remember that Google processes a lot of data for all sorts of applications:

Google Search
AdWords
Maps
Analytics
YouTube

At this rate Google might have to come up with more data centers and subsequently their servers are going to cross a mark that would be incomprehensible for many.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 am and is filed under Search Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.