Google and Its Star Fleet Plumbing

September 12, 2011

Data Center Knowledge declares, “Report: Google Uses About 900,000 Servers.” Recent estimates have put the number at over a million servers, states writer Rich Miller, but new data on energy usage reduces that speculative figure to about 900,000. The data has been compiled by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey in this report.

Miller elaborates:

Google’s David Jacobowitz, a program manager on the Green Energy team, told Koomey that the electricity used by the company’s data centers was less than 1% of 198.8 billion kWh – the estimated total global data center energy usage for 2010. That means that Google may be running its entire global data center network in an energy footprint of roughly 220 megawatts of power.

Energy efficiency is a focus of the forward thinking Google, which is looking to employ many more servers in years to come. The company has designed a system called Spanner to automate management across data centers. Servers may reach from 1 million to 10 million computers.

It seems that, despite all its troubles, the GOOG doesn’t plan to go away any time soon.

Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2011

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Google, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.