Google's servers and challenges they face

---MAD--- · 30-05-2008, 08:54 PM

I just read this article on pcnews.com, http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-99...l?tag=nefd.top, it's quite insaine....

Google have over 10,000 servers but look at this:

In each cluster's first year, it's typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will "go wonky," with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there's about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

That's crazy how things like this, in a modern day still happen to a large scale.

Heres an image:
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/200...an_400x318.jpg

Notice the fan to cool the servers, haha?

Pretty interesting stuff although the article's far too long and just bores me

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xxMATTGxx · 30-05-2008, 08:58 PM

If they are Google Servers, I would of thought they have better cooling systems such as Air Condition or something?

**HotelUser** · 30-05-2008, 09:03 PM

One of the Google founders is obsessed with optimizing for speed and performance. Technical failures are unpreventable...though that's what technicians are for. Having said that, I have never experienced downtime on google servers. Google uptime statistics:
http://uptime.pingdom.com/site/month...www.google.com
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=192

---MAD--- · 30-05-2008, 09:37 PM

Obviously you wouldn't notice the down time due to the thousands of servers there to support each other

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N!ck · 30-05-2008, 10:02 PM

Well they have hundreds of thousandes of servers across the world so who's bothered if a few of them are down for a couple of minutes per month. It's not like Google's slow lol.