Google reveals its ‘secret’ servers

Perhaps dozen of times each day you go to google.com.au, enter a word or two into the thin white box and hit the Google Search button. A tenth of a second later you’re magically presented with the first of several pages containing hundreds of highly accurate links. You click the one you want – usually it’s the first few links – and off you go.

The process is so fast and so commonplace that you probably don’t even think about Google or what’s behind that blink-and-you-miss-it search. But while Google’s search  algorithms remain top secret, the company has lifted the veil on the hardware it uses – the actual physical engine behind the search engine, if you will.

During a conference at its headquarters in Mountain View, California – one of the major hubs of Silicon Valley – Google shone the spotlight on its own servers as an example of engineering an efficient data centre.

Google designs and builds its own servers using off-the-shelf components. Each box is 3.5 inches thick – in the language of data centres and Big Iron that’s 2U (two rack units, as the standard slot in a 19 inch or 23 inch equipment rack is 1.75 inches high).

Mounted on a Gigabyte motherboard are a pair of x86 processors (Google sources a mix from AMD and Intel), two 3.5 inch high capacity hard drives and eight memory slots (all filled).

Sitting off to one side of the rack chassis is a 12 volt battery that steps in to power the server for 1-2 hours in the event of a power failure. Instead of using a large and expensive uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide backup for the entire server farm during the time between a failed mains supply and when the backup generators kick in, Google chose to outfit each server with its own 12 volt battery.

This is not only much cheaper than a UPS, it’s more efficient and matches the cost directly against each server – typical geek granularity.

The battery’s two hour capacity allows enough time for the backup power to come online, the mains power to return (in the case of a short-lived dropout or brownout) or even a faulty power supply in the server rack to be replaced.

Each server is mounted in a standard shipping container, with 1,160 servers per container.

For more detail plus pics, check out Stephen Shankland’s excellent write-up at News.com.