Google: More Plumbing
October 18, 2008
Google makes no secret of its commitment to plumbing; that is, data centers and other infrastructure. Companies trying to compete with Google have to deal with one hard fact–scaling for online services is complicated. Google’s competitive advantage rests not with its advertising business model. Unless Google can service visitors and advertisers, there is no Google advantage. Iain Thomson’s “Google Investing Profits in Data Centres” here makes this point clearly. Mr. Thomson quoted Google founder Sergey Brin as saying, “We’re investing heavily in data centres and will continue to do so. “With the new equipment we can do a lot more today with less.” Google’s competitors, including Microsoft, are racing to deploy new software such as Monsoon and high performance, lower cost servers in an effort to match Google byte for byte. ArnoldIT.com’s research suggests that Google’s 10 year investment in plumbing creates a gap rapid, big spending cannot easily match. Google’s engineers have found clever ways to accelerate such mundane tasks as record locking and unlocking, hardly a glamorous operation in data management. But hundreds of incremental innovations give Google’s infrastructure performance gains that allow the company to deploy new services with only minimal downtime and latency. Translating Google’s advantage to money is not easy because Google provides limited data about its system. Anecdotal reports suggest that for every dollar Google spends, a competitor must spend more to match Google’s data throughput performance. Some data from late 2004 are reported in the 2005 Infonortics’ study The Google Legacy here.
Stephen Arnold, October 18, 2008
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