Friday, April 21, 2006

100k+ new servers per quarter at Google?

Over in the comments of Paul Kedrosky's blog, Paul and I were talking about Google's $345M capital expenditures in Q1 2006.

Assuming that capex is mainly for buying commodity servers, that works out to roughly 100k-200k new servers in Q1 2006. Paul says he thinks the lower end of that range, 100k or so, is more likely.

Either way, wowsers. That is quite a cluster they are building.

See also my previous posts, "200k+ servers at Google and growing" and "In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power".

See also my previous posts, "Google Sawzall" and "Google Cluster Architecture".

Update: Two months later, John Markoff and Saul Hansell at the New York Times report that "the best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world." [via Don Dodge]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greg, couldn't a significant portion of the $345M be going toward the cost of property acquisition and physical plant construction for their datacenters? Even 100K strikes me as a remarkably high number.

Greg Linden said...

Could be. There is a big assumption here that most of the capex is for servers. As far as I know, the details of that capex spending have not been disclosed.

As for whether that capex could be going mostly for acquiring property and physical plant, I thought that Google leased their datacenters. Is that not true?

Anonymous said...

From what I've heard, this speculative article from Robert Cringely is not far off...

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051124.html

Long story short, they are setting up many shippable server clusters to deploy at various internet bottlenecks.

Anonymous said...

That sounds about right. I read that myspace was adding 100 new servers per day - and that waas about 5 months ago.