Google’s Plumbing
April 8, 2009
Short honk: Don’t think the GOOG has a lead in data centers? Check out this video available from Google Blogoscoped. Keep in mind the factoid from my 2005 Google study here. Google’s $1.00 of data center investment returns more than $4.00 in performance compared to high end, branded servers from big name manufacturers. Cheap, fast, and scalable. Google’s plumbing delivers throughput at a lower cost than the competitions’ data centers. What’s this mean in capex? A competitor’s data center costing $650 million would have to be four times larger to match a comparable Google data center’s performance. That’s more than $2.5 billion to reach parity. Now multiply this by 36 and you the hill the Google challengers have to climb. Don’t like my $4.00 number. Chop it in half. Still a big hill. The problem is that I have citations that suggest that under certain circumstances Google enjoys a 17X advantage. I don’t include that number in my studies because frankly no one I have met understands this type of gap. Make yourself happy. Pick a number.
Stephen Arnold, April 8, 2009
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