Text 8305, 54 rader
Skriven 2005-11-20 15:00:10 av Mike '/m' (1:379/45)
Ärende: This is beginning to look interesting...
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From: Mike '/m' <mike@barkto.com>

... even moreso if it is even remotely correct.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

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... So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

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.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64.
Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many
data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google
closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication
and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most
especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at
little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data
center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example.
Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com
years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast
over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected
at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be
reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real,
or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits
and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet
TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer
soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally,
too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely
backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away
unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can
possibly be made for a network app....
===

 /m

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