Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its internet might, at a conference in California about the increasingly prominent issue of datacentre efficiency.
Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, HP, IBM or Sun. But Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. Ben Jai, who designed many of Google's servers, unveiled a modern Google server before the hungry eyes of a technically sophisticated audience.
Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that, since 2005, its datacentres have been composed of standard shipping containers — each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.
A number of attendees — the kind of people who run datacentres packed with thousands of servers for a living — were surprised not only by Google's built-in battery approach, but by the fact that the company has kept it secret for years. Jai said in an interview that Google has been using the design since 2005 and now is in its sixth or seventh generation of design.
"It was our Manhattan Project," Jai said of the design.
Google has an obsessive focus on energy efficiency and now is sharing more of its experience with the world. With the recession pressuring operations budgets, environmental concerns waxing, and energy prices and constraints increasing, the time is ripe for Google to do more efficiency evangelism, said Urs Hoelzle, Google's vice president of operations.
"There wasn't much benefit in trying to preach if people weren't interested in it," said Hoelzle, but now attitudes have changed.
The company also focuses on datacentre issues such as power distribution, cooling and ensuring hot and cool air do not intermingle, said Chris Malone, who is involved in the datacentre design and efficiency measurement. Google's datacentres have now reached efficiency levels that the Environmental Protection Agency hopes will be attainable in 2011 using advanced technology.
"We've achieved this now by application of best practices and some innovations — nothing really inaccessible to the rest of the market," Malone said.
Why built-in batteries?
Typical datacentres rely on large, centralised machines called uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) — essentially giant batteries that kick in when the main supply fails and before generators have time to kick in. Building the power supply into the server is cheaper and means costs are matched directly to the number of servers, Jai said.
"This is much cheaper than huge centralised UPS," he said. "Therefore no wasted capacity."
Efficiency is another financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: "We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency."
The Google server was 3.5 inches thick — 2U, or two rack units, in datacentre parlance. It had two processors, two hard drives and eight memory slots...
Talkback
Hmm, I wonder how they got patents. It would seem the ultimate in obvious. Security lighting and alarm systems have been doing this to my knowledge since the early 1980s.
Local batteries also mean that there is never a single point of failure, so large chunks of infrastructure can fail and the rest will still work (precisely why it's used for emergency lighting).
Having read the text of a number of recently contentious patents, I'm not surprised that they are granted, probably because they are not even understood (a method and system to cross the road). USPO has stated that they have little option other than to to grant a patent unless someone objects. A cop out!