Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber? 534
beat.net writes "Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up: "The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.""
Google is Skynet? (Score:5, Interesting)
5000 Opterons (Score:4, Interesting)
5000 Opterons? It makes sense to put those near power plants / ice bergs. That's at least 500 kW of heat dissipation.
Re:Google is Skynet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stealing (Score:5, Interesting)
Cooling 5000 Opterons? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not wirelessly replace the internet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, what? (Score:2, Interesting)
The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
Er, they plug a bunch of servers into the Internet and suddenly it's the Internet that's doing the processing and storage, not the servers? Sounds magical. Maybe I can plug my Playstation into the Internet and turn the entire Internet into a giant game.
Same applies to Skype (Score:3, Interesting)
Skype is in the same situation - they've been able to support so many users simply because their bandwidth is only used to setup the initial connection between the two parties, after that it's the telcos who are supporting and providing the infrastructure for the service that threatens them most. Now that Skype can make real money from its pay services, look for them to do something simliar to Google, to ensure the availability of their service.
Re:Cooling 5000 Opterons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't buy latency... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice work of fiction (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'd be curious to hear where I've gone astray in my figuring.
Not to mention, of course, the enormous electrical requirements this thing would have, as you've commented. If we round the CPU's power consumption up to account for all the support machinery, and figure 100W per CPU, this neat little semi-load is going to want half a megawatt, plus cooling. Just the disk array will chew through 50kW or so. Even from a power plant's perspective, that's a pretty hefty chunk of juice.
Akamai (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.akamai.com/ [akamai.com]
Half the big boy websites I visit seem to run through these guys. They seem to provide fat throughput for mega sites, apparently hosted in a distributed geographical fashion. I could just be imagining these things, though, because I really don't have a clue.
Re:Google is Skynet? So is Wikipedia now Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nice work of fiction (Score:4, Interesting)
40 * 40 * 40 feet -> 104 Watts/sqft out...
Obviously... (Score:5, Interesting)
...the puppy's on fire.
How are they going to cool these things?
"Google Desktop" delivered via FreeNX? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google will manage everything for its users: software upgrades, backups, search and organisation of personal data and files. Just like ISPs 20 years ago offered a monthly rate of 20 $US to connect to the internet (giving away a 2400 b/sec modem for a reduced price), Google could ask for a 20 $US fee (and give away a Google Thin Client embedded into a georgeous 17'' LCD screen that includes a EJ45 jack) to take care of people's computers.
I for one would sign in immediately.
So, Cringely is wrong. No need for AJAX office. It will all work with traditional GUI desktop programs, over an NX link that does not consume more than 40 kBits/sec for office productivity work.
So, Cringely is also right. The operating system doesn't matter to Google.
additionally... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not fucking 1997 any more.
"Peering points" -- big, open-access traffic exchange handoffs like the old MAE-East [wikipedia.org] and MAE-West used to be a big deal back in the late 90s, when OC-12 circuits were still rare and hideously expensive beasts, and Gigabit Ethernet was still a gleam in some 3Com engineer's eye.
In 2005, they simply don't matter. The big players (level3, MCI/Verizon, Qwest, SBC, etc) all exchange traffic over private fiber interconnects, and everyone else buys transit from the big guys directly or ponies up for a switch port at Equinox, PAIX/Switch&Data or some other 'carrier neutral' colocation center. Dropping a datacenter-in-a-box onto MAE-east or any of its surviving ilk would buy Google precisely nothing.
(And nevermind the fact that google is documented to own thousands upon thousands of unused square feet of datacenter space already: they went on a very well-thought-out buying spree in 2000-2001 when all the dot-com datacenter companies were going out of business, and are very well provisioned for the forseeable future as a result.)
Now, a much more interesting application of the "Google node in a shipping container" idea can be summed up in one simple word: China. Why wait for the local market to develop the infrastructure you need when you can just drop a box down and then run fiber to it? I'm still dubious though...
Not $500,000 (Score:3, Interesting)
One 20Ft container is:
* Length (20Ft)
* Width (8Ft)
* Height (8.5Ft)
That means you can get about 12 * 19" racks in, using 4 rows, about 64U high. That means a total of 3072 servers, using dual socket, dual core opterons, that's 12288 cores. Each server with 8 memory sockets + 4 disks, that's 24,576GB of RAM (1G sticks) and 6,144,000GB of Storage (500G disks). With some guestimate figures on current prices, I'd say one of those container would be worth about $12,500,000.
But then again, from a quick Google, they have about $3 billion in cash, and that's a lot of containers....
PS: I'm european using metrics mostly, so they're might be a small conversion problem here and there
When Google owns all our data access... (Score:3, Interesting)
My thought for all that dark fiber.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is doing what we're told bad altogether or are people going to open their eyes?
Re:Scary (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, I can see this working because the media companies themselves (the labels, the networks, the studios), the very ones who can't afford to have all those redundant servers and data and managing their own damn network, will be the ones to finance it all by buying local cache space. rather than serve up "Welcome Back, Kotter" from media1.abc_and_nick_at_nite_joint_server.com and killing that server, they'll serve it up from "abc_nick_at_nite_joint.googlemedia.com" and the DNS system will return the nearest google.com to the user -- boom, no latency and no 1 million hits all on the same server killing it in seconds from a public announcement of "first season of Friends is available now!".
A site served up by google in this way would survive a slashdotting without any second thoughts.
Google cache, google mail, google groups, google maps, google yellow pages, google-licensed 3rd party services serving up all the above google stuff, all financed by google advertising and all of the media paying for hosting on google's redundant servers rather than killing their own network servers...
with all of that information in google's hands, able to return the fastest searches around, the other search tools, *especially* microsoft's late entry into this market, simply won't matter.
google doesn't care about the search business as such anymore; they've already won it big enough to make the search market itself a commodity as much as microsoft made the OS a commodity, much as they kept insistent they weren't going to...
Re:The Alternative Re:Google is Skynet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great distances of rural farmland .
http://www.locustworld.com/ [locustworld.com] is a awesome idea, and they have done some
great things, but there are many places off the coast where distances
between cities is greater than the range of WiFi unless u use the ballon trick .
But long shots in the midwest are going to have to route via
conventional telecom unless we setup telecommunications WiFi ballons .
www.21stcenturyairships.com
Someone has to pay for them
high enough to avoid all wind .
Ex-MislTech
Shipping Containers can be problematic (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea was good, except for a couple of problems.
These shipping containers are nothing but a giant metal box. Grounding can become an issue, so can accidnentally having the box be one of of the poles for a DC based power system. If you are near an active AM tower, the box becomes a giant antenna and it's virtually impossible to filter out the AM signal internally.
Last, and certainly not least, these shipping containers are vulnerable to rust and other problems due to exposure to the elements. That can take several years (5 or so) if the box is in perfect shape at the start, but if they are using used boxes then it can take less than 2 years for rust holes to be a problem.
Plus, physical security isn't all that good unless the walls are beefed up.
I'm hoping these are not "standard" shipping containers, just something that looks like them.
This grand experiment with shipping containers for cellular applications was an attempt to make it cheaper to deploy equipment to new locations. And, shipping containers (especially used) were a _LOT_ cheaper than fibrebond or other prefab buildings for that purpose. Of course, the fibrebond building had a lifespan a lot longer than 2 to 5 years. So, you get what you pay for.
Re:Sounds like Cringely saw a Petabox (Score:3, Interesting)
The petabox project has essentially one design goal: "What is the absolute minimum amount of hardware we can wrap hard drives in and still have a useful system?" And the answer, apparently, is "a 1U half-depth case with a tiny Via board". That they can get power consumption down to 40W/TB is incredible - that's just twice the power consumption of the disk they're building with. But it's not useful to Google.
Google is asking a completely different question, because they need not just a boatload of disk, but a lot of processing power to be constantly crunching that data, either running Gmail, web searches, data analysis, Google Maps, or whatever the AJAX app of the week is. These boxes will be doing a lot more than serving data, they'll be responding to queries that in aggregate will require thousands of MIPS and terabytes of RAM.
Ultimately, I suppose, it's the same quest. Least stuff-you-don't-care-about possible. Most value per {dollar, watt, square foot,
Re:additionally... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice thought, but it's not going to happen. And the reason why is that China is extremely wary of companies like Google. The Chinese government is about one thing, and that one thing is control. They're a-okay if you want to run a business in their territory, so long as you knuckle under when they want you to. Google's policies are not concordant with Chinese policy, nor is google willing to subjugate itself to Chinese policy. As a result i find your hypothetical (while good thinking) extremely unlikely. On top of all of that, there is an issue of pride involved in this. As everyone keeps pointing out, it's possible that the internet will some day be Google. China doesn't want this because they don't want their chunk of internet to be run and administered by an american company.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of unfibered places where such boxes could be deployed. Hopefully attempts to bring Africa into the modern world will allow for projects such as this. India may also be another idea (i'm not entirely aware of what the fiber map of India looks like, nor how well it's connected across the country, but if their connectivity is as varied as poverty and starvation, there's a lot of room to expand still).
Well, Cringely, which is it? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/15552
Re:Google is Skynet? So is Wikipedia now Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nice work of fiction (Score:1, Interesting)
This is pure bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
It's about that Google want to be able to move Google computers around in any datacenter asap. We know that google uses a grid of single computers, that all compute the search results as fast as possible. All these computers create a space-problem (physical space) at any datacenter that Google owns. Also, shipping these computers around costs money. I bet google store this "secret package" just to be able to send it around anywhere where there suddenly is a problem with the network.. We all know how much money google loose if they are experiencing downtime...
Re:Google is TV ?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Google will end up becoming the first sentient AI,...
Not AI, try TV and broadcasting on demand. What else could you do with that much storage, CPU and memory?
My guess, and it is only a guess, GoogleTV is geting a lot bigger and going to carry some 500,000 to 1,000,000 full length movies and shows or something. And it will be so kewl for us to watch what we want and not what some clown wants us to watch. I suspect it will change ratings too as your not stuck picking from the least boring shows because there is nothing better on. No more pre-empting Enterprise.
http://news.com.com/GoogleTV+is+hiring/2100-1026 _3-5876654.html
Or maybe I am being wishful.
Cringley is wrong. Google is going ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope they succeed along with their WIFI access.
Good job boys.
One more point if anyone at Google is listening. How about a tax on chip companies to use this highspeed access. It would be nice if they could help support it since they are the ones who benefit.
Re:Google is Skynet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is why I DON'T "support our troops" in Irag - since they're doing bad things on stupid orders for the benefit of traitors to the country.
Not to mention being morons for being in a military organization in the first place - and I say that after having been in the US Army for three years AND in Vietnam. Yes, I was a moron - WAS.)
Re:Google is Skynet? So is Wikipedia now Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition, I've noticed that any time I don't find much help on Google, invariably I can easily rephrase what I want as a series of very general questions, and then feeding a few of them to Ask Jeeves will get genuinely useful hits. The more I have only the simple, "obvious" lay-man's questions on the subject the more some of Google's alternatives are the way to go.
The last time for me was finding useful stuff on DIY satellite dishes. If you don't yet know any of the terms (which I didn't, then), like C-band, Ku-band, LNBF, Free To Air, and such, Google gives a huge number of useless to just plain evil links. It's not just lots of people who want to sell you a overpriced 'complete solution', but 6 year old, never updated web pages that want to sell you a dish 5 meters across at 30,000$, "Christian" Broadcasters who want you to help them buy more gear and have replaced all the standard terms with "It needs a new thingee, around here we just call it a Jesus-box, won't you please help?", and Utar Pradesh complaining about how Nepal either needs to translate their G2S's signal out of Hindi, or into it.
The only way around it starting from Google seems to be running across about 5 of the 'insider' terms, Wiki for every single one of them, look for what other terms are links, keep Wiki'ing, and thus fairly swiftly refine your search. Basically, without Wikipedia or some other shortcut, you have to get to about the depth where you know how (and WHY) global positioning works differently for civilian uses (like Onstar) and Military uses, and which idiots in Congress voted which way on it, just as a side effect of learning enough to build your own TV receiver (assuming you're already a fair solder jockey and don't need to learn what a MOSFET is). That's a terribly steep learning curve.
This is for a subject that's not really all that esoteric, but it has a half dozen facets, all of which Google can't sort out by simple searches - for just one example mistaking sites that are about beaming 'politally free' info into authoritarian countries for 'own instead of rent type free' consumer solutions. In the process, you are likely to still not know many things that might be of much more interest to most people wanting to build or just own a home satellite system, such as the existence of PC card recievers and motor controllers, or if you can combine satellite internet access with TV reception when you are trying to avoid just renting a dish.
Something like "How do I get satellite TV free?" on Ask Jeeves will get you that whole list of terms and some basic definitions and diagrams very quickly. Ask Jeeves seems to try and match the whole question if it can, before searching for phrases and keywords, and that leads to pages that are set up in question and answer format. In this case, the first link back when I tried it was to a "How things work" page that gave accurate and generally unbiased info, frequently updated.
(Warning, I haven't tried this lately, for all I know Ask Jeeves has gone out of business and I missed it).
Re:article doesn't explain network (Score:5, Interesting)
The specifications [bigbruin.com] [see footnote for a few other sites] state 146 mm) x (101.6 mm) x (25.4 mm) x 7 340 = 2.76551705 m^3 [google.com],
and, running with the article's numbers, let's see how much of 20 feet cubed that is... (article: the most storage, memory and power support into a 20...foot box -- note that a BOX of course is less cubic area than a 20-foot cube)....
((146 mm) x (101.6 mm) x (25.4 mm) x 7 340) / (20 (feet^3)) = 4.88316565 [google.com]...
WHAT? it's not a fraction, but larger by a factor of 4+??? Just for the hard-drives? Even when we assumed a CUBE???
Man, I want some of the shit that guy's smoking. I was expecting to debunk with just the hard-drives taking an impossibly large percentage of the proposed 20-foot "box". But....man. Cringely must not have done even a basic sanity check. (And remember, I'm pretty sure he didn't have a 20 foot high, 20 foot wide box in mind, or he would have said cube. To a writer, a "20-foot box" sounds like an elongated storage container [uniteam.org], e.g. 8x8x20 feet.... BTW that's the first hit for 20 foot storage container [google.com], I can only assume a writer would have such a thing in mind...)
English and math, people, English AND math.
Footnote:
Other sources for specifications:
Re:additionally... (Score:3, Interesting)
(And I find the idea of Google parking a tractor trailer with their hypothetical container-box node on the street next to 111 8th ave particularly amusing. Nevermind heat dissipation issues: can they afford the parking tickets?)
Re:Can't buy latency... (Score:3, Interesting)
So, they send trunks of servers to near you to reduce the latency, and when you need more responsive systems, they send servers to your building, and if you need to reduce the latency even more, they send the servers to your desk.
Yes, I see where it goes, very inovative. But ignore the rant, I don't want to stay on the way of a nice buzzword.