David Utter writes in his Web Pro News column today about Robert Cringely, who thinks he has some news about Google.
He’s found a deep dark secret in the Googleplex, our Cringely has. Lurking in places where even Googlers may not tread, 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.
Forget about latency if Google drops one of these off at a peering point near you. High-bandwidth and low cost means Google can deliver streaming video content without a hiccup.
We’ve noted an increase in broadband adoption this year over past years. Google’s datacenters-on-trucks could be the way the company maintains its lead in search advertising over its competitors
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