It is easy to push aside thoughts of what makes a company tick, especially when that company is a huge internet conglomerate. We don’t want to think about the thousands of server supporting our information, we just want it to work. But if you take a second, just one second to contemplate just how much work goes into creating search engines like Google or social media like Facebook, maybe you can appreciate how just really amazing they are.
Google
Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings, all over the world.
This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.
Google has kept quiet on the exact number of servers they use, but we do know they have eight huge data centers that house them. Most estimates have Google using between 900,000 and 1,000,000 servers.
Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings, all over the world.
This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.
Google has kept quiet on the exact number of servers they use, but we do know they have eight huge data centers that house them. Most estimates have Google using between 900,000 and 1,000,000 servers.
Facebook
Anyone who has seen The Social Network has been made aware of the importance of multiple servers. In the movie Mark Zuckerburg repeatedly states that his whole business revolves around the fact that the site does not crash. If they crash, they are done. Servers are vital to making that a reality.
Whether or not the movie itself was more fact or fiction, the importance of servers to a company like Facebook cannot be overstated. The current estimate is that Facebook runs on 180,000 servers. But that is not the amazing part.
Innovators at Facebook march to their own drum. As of 2011, they have decided that they don’t like the way servers are made. So they started Open Compute, a program for the design of a new breed of server. And they have already succeeded.
Most companies buy servers from HP, IBM, or Sun. These servers are models. You simply decide what you need, scroll through the list and find what fits best. If you want space, you get a rack server. That server will have a set amount of data, fans, power source, and so on. You can pick a brand, a size, memory, etc. And then you end with a model like the Sun Fire X4140. And other companies, different than you can also end up with the same model. You can get close to what you want, but never exactly. Facebook said ‘screw this’ and started building their own servers, which have entirely customizable parts that are hot-swappable at any point. They are currently transitioning to these. They will end up with less servers and more computing power.
Anyone who has seen The Social Network has been made aware of the importance of multiple servers. In the movie Mark Zuckerburg repeatedly states that his whole business revolves around the fact that the site does not crash. If they crash, they are done. Servers are vital to making that a reality.
Whether or not the movie itself was more fact or fiction, the importance of servers to a company like Facebook cannot be overstated. The current estimate is that Facebook runs on 180,000 servers. But that is not the amazing part.
Innovators at Facebook march to their own drum. As of 2011, they have decided that they don’t like the way servers are made. So they started Open Compute, a program for the design of a new breed of server. And they have already succeeded.
Most companies buy servers from HP, IBM, or Sun. These servers are models. You simply decide what you need, scroll through the list and find what fits best. If you want space, you get a rack server. That server will have a set amount of data, fans, power source, and so on. You can pick a brand, a size, memory, etc. And then you end with a model like the Sun Fire X4140. And other companies, different than you can also end up with the same model. You can get close to what you want, but never exactly. Facebook said ‘screw this’ and started building their own servers, which have entirely customizable parts that are hot-swappable at any point. They are currently transitioning to these. They will end up with less servers and more computing power.