After years of secrecy (maybe because they thought no one was interested), Google held its "Data Center Efficiency Summit" yesterday, where the company showed off one of its DCs and custom web servers -- all in a bid to evangelize for energy efficiency. The green angle means that everything has been planned for optimum power use, from the 1AAA shipping containers (sporting over a thousand servers each) that make up the core of its operations, to the servers themselves -- each containing its own 12-volt UPS. This design is said to boast a staggering 99.9 percent energy efficiency, as opposed to a standard centralized UPS setup which at best would only score 95 percent. According to CNET, these are efficiency levels that the EPA doesn't envision as practical until at least 2011. But that ain't all -- hit that read link for the whole sordid affair, but not before you check out the video of a server itself after the break.
It was not secret because people weren't interested. They've certainly been interested for years to know how Google got their servers to do so much with so little hardware - compared to Sun's super servers that run so much of the Internet. This is very interesting stuff.
Now only if Google would package these babies and sell them. Not that the cat is out of the bag, Google is no doubt at least looking at licensing the internal battery technology to others. Very cool stuff.
Huh? Package it up and sell it? Why? You can already put these things together yourselves. These parts have been available on the markets for years. It's mostly junk too, commodity parts. Gigabyte motherboards, Hitachi "Death Star" hard drives, crummy RAM, etc... So unless you have an extremely fault-tolerate distributed software system like what Google uses in the event of single server failure, it won't do you much good.
They use all sorts of hard drives. The whole point of the system is that it can survive and thrive when hardware goes out - hardware failure was planned in from the beginning.
@paul, no, your'e wrong. Sure, the motherboard is _made_ by Gigabyte, but that doesn't mean you can buy it... Essentially the entire server is custom made for Google.
I wouldn't call a motherboard designed to an individual consumers exact specification a 'commodity part'.
This is the picture perfect company who goes "green" without sticking it in your face unlike annoying companies like e-surance who spends more time being green than being an insurance company. I applaud them for their efforts.
I'm actually surprised they decided to use local batteries. Those gel cell batteries usually have a life of 3-4 years. They stop holding charge and become useless after that time frame. The amount of servers they have and number of batteries must be staggering! As opposed to a giant UPS which may be more less efficient, but can last much longer and would require much less man power to exchange!
I'm guessing these standard shipping container data centres can quickly be loaded on the back of trucks and run wirelessly to make them less easy to target in the event of global data war.
I watched the video and I'm pretty sure that it's a joke. Like many of us lurkers here at Endgadget, I am an IT professional. These are the things that stand out to me that lead me to believe that this is a fake
1. SATA Drives. In order to truly be as efficient as this article supposes the servers would need to rely on something other than standard SATA HDD's for storage. SSD's or more realistically, a boot from SAN option is far more efficient and likely in a server farm whose aim is to be as efficient as possible.
2. CPU fans. If the goal is efficiency, mechanical parts are your enemy. the fans on the CPU heatsinks are drawing at least 5 volts each. The solution to CPU fans is much larger COPPER heatsinks with no dedicated fan units. These types of heatsinks rely on a forced air circulation system from the datacenter A/C units.
3. Battery. What the?....who fell for this? Any IT guy worth his salt will tell you a UPS attached to a UPS is a BAD THING. They cyclically charge each other till one or the other burns up. That very setup is precisely what the description in this article implies. PLUS batteries discharge at a specific rate and charge at specific rate, making this feature of the 'server' no more efficient than if you were to plug it straight into a socket.
4. Efficiency starts and ends with the datacenter. A server is only efficient as the datacenter it is housed in. There are far too many considerations in this statement to sum up here but I can tell you point blank: Without seeing the datacenter, there is no way to determine that actual operational efficiency of this server.
These are my rambling thoughts from my 5 minutes of investigation of the article and video. I do not claim to know everything but I believe that this article is a total spoof. If it's not, I would ask Google to hire me to engineer their next 'super efficient server'
I'm also an IT Professional and I'm having trouble buying this video as well. In fact, the photo above it looks Photoshopped, too. It looks like the racks on the right side are real, but someone took that image and reversed it to "create" the left side. The posts on those racks on the left don't look right. (AFAIK nobody claimed that the photo is actually of Google's data center, though)
The components look pretty unimpressive, too. 2 SATA drives in a non-hot swap configuration? It's definitely NOT the sort of setup that datacenter engineers dream about. If it's actually true, then it might indicate how Google keeps its costs down for its datacenters: LOTS of servers with cheaper components.
You need to think on a much larger scale. Disk failure, fan failure, memory failure, PSU failure are all irrelevant. The server is the single "hot swappable" component. Rather that paying top dollar to have parts that can hot swap or be more reliable over X period of time Google can get much cheaper parts as long as they have an appropriate average life span. It does not matter if one system fails for any reason, all the others that are doing the same thing will pick up the load and provide fail over, mush like a large RAID array of disks. Then all they need to do is swap out the server and fix or trash the broken one depending on the issue. To me is seems like a brilliant way to build such a large system.
The onboard battery is the "UPS" for the server - but allows a DC-DC connection, skipping the inefficiency of AC-DC conversion.
And it's cheap - nothing more than a standard alarm backup battery that costs around $20 retail (probably half that when ordered the quantities used here).
Those batteries have a 5 year life inside a un-conditioned alarm box, so I can see they easily will last the life of their server.
damn, i wonder how much total space they actually have, how many petaflops or whatever the hell hugest term would be. googlebytes, think Im kidding about google not being a word? Look it up, its a number...google
Yes, that has been a unfortunetly a misnormer for awhile now. It is said that the creators of google mispelled the word googol and thought it was spelled google.
"The green angle means that everything has been planned for optimum power use, from the 1AAA shipping containers (sporting over a thousand servers each) that make up the core of its operations, to the servers themselves -- each containing its own 12-volt UPS."
Just exactly what does this mean, if anything. 100 internet points to engadget posting utter shite that could be mistaken as pseudo tech. Fuck off engadget
A lot of what google is doing makes sense. The Server itself doesn't need fast hard drives. It has a ton of ram. My theory is that they had the memory configured in some sort of SSD. When you remove the hard drive from the performance equation you don't need a lot of hardware. The 12V battery is also interesting. It takes a single point of failure from a giant UPS out of the equation. The fact they are using shipping containers, also tells me they are prepared for worst case situations. Its pretty easy to load up shipping containers and deploy servers where ever and when every they want. I have an uncle who works for the military, and he said in the future cyber warfare will be the biggest threat. The goal of our enemies won't be taking out people, but taking out data centers.
Just think if someone was able to take out Myspace. Millions of people would go through serious withdraw. It would make Coke addicts look like functional beings.
So fake! Shot using a crummy cell-phone camera whose owner forgot that these cams don't do macro shots.
The hard drives seemed to be attached using duct-tape. The wiring is a mess and CPUs (AMD) right next to each other is a sure fire way to system overheat.
Google with it's bank of Ph.Ds couldn't come up with a custom made chassis that carried the google logo?
You so-called I.T. professionals are idiots. If you bothered to read any of the associated news articles you'd know this is legit, and the technology is mildly surprising but not unknown. To the fellow talking about a custom-made chassis with the Google logo... why on earth would they spend that sort of money? And how does having a PhD contribute to chassis design? Who are the fools now?
"each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity" how long would that last though? all you need is enough for the servers to shut down properly, & they cant be losing power so often that the efficiency of a UPS system is of any concern.
why are the battery & power supply on opposite sides of the server? http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090401/GoogleServerLarge.jpg?tag=mncol;txt the image shows the power cable running from the 'rear' all the way through the server to the power supply, then from there all the way back through to the battery. make sense to put the battery & power supply next to each other? (the later b&w pic seems to show that the 'rear' is actually the 'front')
its supposedly a custom motherboard so whats with the mouse & kboard connectors, the 2usb, only 1 ethernet (& if that is all on the rear, how is it ever accessed?)
the battery & hd's seem to be tied down with velcro but how is the whole server tray mounted in the rack, dosnt seem to be any mountings on it
Most UPS's come with only one battery. Most of the batteries in them are the same size as the one in the video. The APC brand of UPS I have, has one battery in it and it's the same size as the video.
The amount of CO2 the Kindle could save by replacing three books a month
The Kindle can produce a potential savings of 1,074 kg of CO2 if it replaces three books a month for four years, or a whopping 26,098 kg of CO2 if the Kindle DX is used to its fullest capacity.
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posted Apr 2nd 2009 2:08PM
i like google
This is very, very cool.
@jak0b: Haha, I was thinking the same thing, the original is much better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y
So Vick Mackey is hiding his money in the Google data center now? Did i miss an episode?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGM_jAzPj8
It was not secret because people weren't interested. They've certainly been interested for years to know how Google got their servers to do so much with so little hardware - compared to Sun's super servers that run so much of the Internet. This is very interesting stuff.
Now only if Google would package these babies and sell them. Not that the cat is out of the bag, Google is no doubt at least looking at licensing the internal battery technology to others. Very cool stuff.
Huh? Package it up and sell it? Why? You can already put these things together yourselves. These parts have been available on the markets for years. It's mostly junk too, commodity parts. Gigabyte motherboards, Hitachi "Death Star" hard drives, crummy RAM, etc... So unless you have an extremely fault-tolerate distributed software system like what Google uses in the event of single server failure, it won't do you much good.
Not all Hitachi drives, and not even all Hitachi Deskstars, earned the badge "Deathstars."
I'm pretty sure they were smart enough not to use an especially failure prone hard drive in their servers.
They use all sorts of hard drives. The whole point of the system is that it can survive and thrive when hardware goes out - hardware failure was planned in from the beginning.
@paul, no, your'e wrong. Sure, the motherboard is _made_ by Gigabyte, but that doesn't mean you can buy it... Essentially the entire server is custom made for Google.
I wouldn't call a motherboard designed to an individual consumers exact specification a 'commodity part'.
Yeah, but can it run Doo.......
nevermind.
Nerdgasm
This is the picture perfect company who goes "green" without sticking it in your face unlike annoying companies like e-surance who spends more time being green than being an insurance company. I applaud them for their efforts.
They're not going green, they're cutting their costs.
isn't this supposed to be a joke?
I was just thinking; How can it be 99.9% energy efficient? then why does it so many fans?
yes it is.the article was published on april first as an april fools joke.
Engadget, you do realize that posting an April Fools article on April 2 is..I don't know.. kinda pointless?
It wasn't an April fools joke. I can vouch for these videos as I've worked in their datacentres
@r0tter
you haven't seen what i've been searching for, have you?
:/
Google has a plasma screen on every shipping container showing the userid and search history so everyone can see. Of course he saw your searches.
@ a ham sandwich
midget pr0n?
Who said anything about this being an April Fool's joke?
Yay, feel good about Google's energy usage so you won't mind them owning all available data about everyone and selling it.
This settles it. Google will take over our world with superior sciences and interwebs
Funny thing, I was just discussing Google's April Fools jokes with the other IT guys at my school.
Nerd Alert!
I'm actually surprised they decided to use local batteries. Those gel cell batteries usually have a life of 3-4 years. They stop holding charge and become useless after that time frame. The amount of servers they have and number of batteries must be staggering! As opposed to a giant UPS which may be more less efficient, but can last much longer and would require much less man power to exchange!
"life of 3-4 years"
About the same life as a commodity server... go figure.
3-4 years could be about the length of time the server is in use, until being replaced by newer hardware. Makes sense.
GUYS! This is a joke! Have you actually seen the video? Have you? LOL, nice april fools joke engadget... just a day too late,
One word: Awesome.
Can they sell me one of their servers so I can play Crysis on it?
Whos the dumb loser to post this fake video??
Not sure if that was a joke or not because I dont know much about servers, I liked their carpet though.
The answer came to me after an hour's meditation recently, and it is staggering...
Google may well be the physical manifestation of the Akashic Record, the All-Knowledge Source now materialising in the electromagnetic ether...
Whoahhh....
who make the hard drive?
The one in all the pictures floating around the 'net is a Hitachi drive.
This isn't fake. This is the kind of stuff that datacenter architects drool over, and Google wasn't about to punk a big audience of them. A USPTO search shows GOOG isn't kidding:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=Google&FIELD1=ASNM&co1=AND&TERM2=power&FIELD2=&d=PTXT
I'm guessing these standard shipping container data centres can quickly be loaded on the back of trucks and run wirelessly to make them less easy to target in the event of global data war.
I watched the video and I'm pretty sure that it's a joke. Like many of us lurkers here at Endgadget, I am an IT professional. These are the things that stand out to me that lead me to believe that this is a fake
1. SATA Drives. In order to truly be as efficient as this article supposes the servers would need to rely on something other than standard SATA HDD's for storage. SSD's or more realistically, a boot from SAN option is far more efficient and likely in a server farm whose aim is to be as efficient as possible.
2. CPU fans. If the goal is efficiency, mechanical parts are your enemy. the fans on the CPU heatsinks are drawing at least 5 volts each. The solution to CPU fans is much larger COPPER heatsinks with no dedicated fan units. These types of heatsinks rely on a forced air circulation system from the datacenter A/C units.
3. Battery. What the?....who fell for this? Any IT guy worth his salt will tell you a UPS attached to a UPS is a BAD THING. They cyclically charge each other till one or the other burns up. That very setup is precisely what the description in this article implies. PLUS batteries discharge at a specific rate and charge at specific rate, making this feature of the 'server' no more efficient than if you were to plug it straight into a socket.
4. Efficiency starts and ends with the datacenter. A server is only efficient as the datacenter it is housed in. There are far too many considerations in this statement to sum up here but I can tell you point blank: Without seeing the datacenter, there is no way to determine that actual operational efficiency of this server.
These are my rambling thoughts from my 5 minutes of investigation of the article and video. I do not claim to know everything but I believe that this article is a total spoof. If it's not, I would ask Google to hire me to engineer their next 'super efficient server'
mate you have no idea what your talking about, Jesus, if you worked for me I'd demote you purely based on that post
I'm sure your mom thinks you are an "IT professional", but seriously dude in here you are fooling nobody with that post!
I'm also an IT Professional and I'm having trouble buying this video as well. In fact, the photo above it looks Photoshopped, too. It looks like the racks on the right side are real, but someone took that image and reversed it to "create" the left side. The posts on those racks on the left don't look right. (AFAIK nobody claimed that the photo is actually of Google's data center, though)
The components look pretty unimpressive, too. 2 SATA drives in a non-hot swap configuration? It's definitely NOT the sort of setup that datacenter engineers dream about. If it's actually true, then it might indicate how Google keeps its costs down for its datacenters: LOTS of servers with cheaper components.
You need to think on a much larger scale. Disk failure, fan failure, memory failure, PSU failure are all irrelevant. The server is the single "hot swappable" component. Rather that paying top dollar to have parts that can hot swap or be more reliable over X period of time Google can get much cheaper parts as long as they have an appropriate average life span. It does not matter if one system fails for any reason, all the others that are doing the same thing will pick up the load and provide fail over, mush like a large RAID array of disks. Then all they need to do is swap out the server and fix or trash the broken one depending on the issue. To me is seems like a brilliant way to build such a large system.
They aren't running "a UPS on a UPS"
The onboard battery is the "UPS" for the server - but allows a DC-DC connection, skipping the inefficiency of AC-DC conversion.
And it's cheap - nothing more than a standard alarm backup battery that costs around $20 retail (probably half that when ordered the quantities used here).
Those batteries have a 5 year life inside a un-conditioned alarm box, so I can see they easily will last the life of their server.
damn, i wonder how much total space they actually have, how many petaflops or whatever the hell hugest term would be. googlebytes, think Im kidding about google not being a word? Look it up, its a number...google
I think you mean googol
Yes, that has been a unfortunetly a misnormer for awhile now. It is said that the creators of google mispelled the word googol and thought it was spelled google.
Yes, it's not like they could just google the correct spelling.
OH geez, I read about Google using shipping containers about 3 years ago. This is way old news
"The green angle means that everything has been planned for optimum power use, from the 1AAA shipping containers (sporting over a thousand servers each) that make up the core of its operations, to the servers themselves -- each containing its own 12-volt UPS."
Just exactly what does this mean, if anything. 100 internet points to engadget posting utter shite that could be mistaken as pseudo tech. Fuck off engadget
A lot of what google is doing makes sense. The Server itself doesn't need fast hard drives. It has a ton of ram. My theory is that they had the memory configured in some sort of SSD. When you remove the hard drive from the performance equation you don't need a lot of hardware. The 12V battery is also interesting. It takes a single point of failure from a giant UPS out of the equation. The fact they are using shipping containers, also tells me they are prepared for worst case situations. Its pretty easy to load up shipping containers and deploy servers where ever and when every they want. I have an uncle who works for the military, and he said in the future cyber warfare will be the biggest threat. The goal of our enemies won't be taking out people, but taking out data centers.
Just think if someone was able to take out Myspace. Millions of people would go through serious withdraw. It would make Coke addicts look like functional beings.
I wonder if yahoo is also setup in this fashion.
So fake!
Shot using a crummy cell-phone camera whose owner forgot that these cams don't do macro shots.
The hard drives seemed to be attached using duct-tape. The wiring is a mess and CPUs (AMD) right next to each other is a sure fire way to system overheat.
Google with it's bank of Ph.Ds couldn't come up with a custom made chassis that carried the google logo?
Rajib: This is real. FYI the harddrives are held on by velco straps not duct tape.
You so-called I.T. professionals are idiots. If you bothered to read any of the associated news articles you'd know this is legit, and the technology is mildly surprising but not unknown. To the fellow talking about a custom-made chassis with the Google logo... why on earth would they spend that sort of money? And how does having a PhD contribute to chassis design? Who are the fools now?
"each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity"
how long would that last though? all you need is enough for the servers to shut down properly, & they cant be losing power so often that the efficiency of a UPS system is of any concern.
why are the battery & power supply on opposite sides of the server?
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090401/GoogleServerLarge.jpg?tag=mncol;txt
the image shows the power cable running from the 'rear' all the way through the server to the power supply, then from there all the way back through to the battery. make sense to put the battery & power supply next to each other?
(the later b&w pic seems to show that the 'rear' is actually the 'front')
its supposedly a custom motherboard
so whats with the mouse & kboard connectors, the 2usb, only 1 ethernet
(& if that is all on the rear, how is it ever accessed?)
the battery & hd's seem to be tied down with velcro
but how is the whole server tray mounted in the rack, dosnt seem to be any mountings on it
Most UPS's come with only one battery. Most of the batteries in them are the same size as the one in the video. The APC brand of UPS I have, has one battery in it and it's the same size as the video.