Google like it's 1999
By Phillip Torrone 
posted Sep 16th 2004 1:39PM
posted Sep 16th 2004 1:39PM
The picture above is of all the hardware it took to run Google (Lego bricks and all) back in 1999. Kinda
freaks us out, though we're not really sure why.
[Via Waxy.org]
... i could see why this would freak me out. They weren't using 1Us or blades. Those actually look like desktop machines repurposed as servers. I do see what appears to be hot-swappable hard drives though. Clearly they weren't going to scale past an insanely remarkable proof-of-concept with such a set-up :) Unless they have one big warehouse as their data center.
Not sure why it "kinda freaks you out"? Maybe it's because a company whose complete hardware is on a fold-up table a mere 5 years later has a market cap of $23.1 billion!
that's not fair... they cleaned up all the ashtrays...
ah in there i found a picture of the billionaire sergei in drag...
http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg
... there's not a backup tape or drive in sight :-)
You remember when your company had one of those HP servers that sounded like an airplane taking off. Or maybe you still do.
Yap, I worked in MS Research around that time on a net search project and we were using far less than that for a prototype.
Until you have tons of people using your search engine at the same time it's not a computing intensive task at all. Just storage.
Blades and racks and all that crap are great but really hard drives in a white box work just fine.
Backing up is pointless - you are rebuilding your crawl constantly.
Of course the thing we kept saying was: buy google, buy google, buy google. This was 98 (I think) and $250 million would have worked despite their protests. Certainly a better buy than FrontPage and SoftImage.
Well, it does not look so bad to me.
Sure, one could get better hardware, but a bunch of PCs will do for a start.
I bet it didn't stay like that too long.
Why is there only 1 screen on ?
http://web.archive.org/web/19990208004515/google.stanford.edu/
Pretty cool
The two squarish boxes under the table on the left look like the Unix boxes I used to work on back then. They were DEC Alpha's. Usually dual or quads with two RAID cards apiece. 9 drives standard or you could use a NAS or SAN unit to up it. Really cool :) brings back memories.
there are couple of power edge 4200 under the desk. nice servers at the time. i have one in my basement file serving mp3s...
i have roughly the same set up under my desk right now.
Thats all the response you need when shown someones BABY pictures...
"see Is'nt he clever, he can crawl and everything... just the other day he did the cutest thing..."
Got some racks in the same colo as Google (in VA) -- they've come a long way. Hundreds of bare motherboards on shelves in custom racks, drives attached with what look like velcro straps. Power and Ethernet are the only connections to each... For some reason, seeing the rows of racks in a dark, cold cage -- fans whining -- makes me think of Skynet.
amazing, I take my hat off to these people, they start with almost nothing and grow into a multi-billion dollar company in a few years, i'd like to take a page out of thier books.
The same technology is available to virtually everyone.
Props to www.google.com for taking advantage of it!
-- Neel K. Sanghi
www.sanghi.tv
Even AYJW.org, a comparatively small site uses more equipment than that. Really shows what a determined human and his computer can do.
I can't remember the URL for the pictures of the actual Data Centers.
It would be funny to see them next to the old ones.
here are more pics at their old desk
I'm being shocked !
http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html
Those aren't LEGO brand legos!