Verily I say unto you, who knows if this will amount to much but it is nevertheless a heavy scene. Via Slashdot.
You heard it first on Troppo – well second actually (maybe third).
Google’s Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?
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.
This sounds cool and everything, but:
1. It could just a shipping container with regular stuff.
2. A tightly packed shipping container will be much more expensive to build than just slotting stuff into racks at an existing colo warehouse.
3. Cringely has a terrible record for making predictions, exceeded only by Microsoft and Dvorak.
Slashdot is great reading, but they tend to be incredibly unskeptical and uncritical of stories about Google, even the wishful thinking stories.
Still, I was dead wrong when I pointed out why Macintel would never happen. Stranger things have happened.
google seems like a fad at the moment…cash rich but i dont think they have many solid ideas for revenue.
the best thing in the IT world of the past 15 years has come out of sun and i dont think theyre making much money.
i dont know, maybe they’ll make it but its not as assured as everyone seems to think.