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What kind of hardware does Google use?

  • Exclusively Intel processors? Always?
  • Xeons, Duos, or Quads?
  • Intel chipsets?
  • motherboards - Intel, Gigabyte, MSI?
  • What kind and build of RAM?
  • What physical memory configuration (single large capacity modules or multiple smaller capacity modules)?
  • What brand of HDD (I know they used to buy almost all the brands - from their disk failure report)?
  • Were they able to implement a single voltage power supply for their servers (like they had been pushing for a long time to Intel)?

Any other trivia you have or would like to share?

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This would fit better on Serverfault.com or SuperUser.com – Brandon Jul 20 '09 at 17:42
People shouldn't move conversations from StackOverflow or ServerFault to SuperUser.com while it's still in better. It's fracking annoying to be posting a decent answer to something in one side, and then bam, it's closed and locked up in a site I can't access. What if the author himself doesn't have access to the site? – darthcoder Jul 20 '09 at 18:22
@darthcoder ServerFault is no longer password protected. Try clearing your cookies etc. and accessing it - it'll let you right in. – ceejayoz Jul 20 '09 at 18:44
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 20 '09 at 17:59

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5 Answers

up vote 10 down vote

Lots of these:

Servers

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this was pretty much the defining article for me – MikeJ Jul 21 '09 at 1:01
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up vote 10 down vote

Take a look at Google platform.

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mmmm.... Server Pr0n – Saul Dolgin Jul 20 '09 at 18:31
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up vote 1 down vote

This is pretty neat discription.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

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up vote 1 down vote

If you want commercially available hardware that's very similar to what Google does (DC power supplies, stripped down systems, ultra high density) then check out SGI/Rackable's Cloud Rack product line.

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up vote 0 down vote

Have you tried contacting Google themselves? Seems to me anything else is probably just guesswork.

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Google are notoriously silent about their data centers or configurations, hence all the guesswork ;) – Mark Henderson♦ Jul 21 '09 at 1:03
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