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Urs Hölzle Profile picture
Sep 26, 2021 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
A trip down memory lane...exactly 23 years ago Google signed its first datacenter contract.  Let's walk through the lease in a thread. First, the copy you see here was sent by a "fax machine" which was something people used back then. Image
The data center provider was Exodus, a now-defunct company that was a leading provider at the time and had a market cap of tens of billions of dollars at the height of the dotcom bubble.  The facility was located at 2251 Lawson Lane in Santa Clara (since torn down).
The first item on the order is a VDC (Virtual Data Center) measuring 7x4 feet (2.1x1.2m). You could barely lay down a mattress in this space. Imagine a "cage" with a mesh wire fence and a door, and inside there was a set of shelves (kinda like bookshelves) with PCs on it. Image
A1 through a24 were the main machines to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines. (There were no b machines.) I say "machine" not "server" because they were whitebox office PC enclosures with external disks attached.
Note the handwritten addition at the bottom, requesting 3 20A power circuits.  That's 3*16A usable @ 110V, or about 5kW, so each machine drew less than 180W.
Back then, datac enters were priced by the sqft even though the actual cost of providing data center space is almost exclusively proportional to power, so by asking for extra power Larry got a better deal.
Still, at $4000/month this was the world's most expensive mattress-sized space. Until you look at the cost of bandwidth: $1200/month for a single Mbps. We had two lines, one for web crawling and one for serving.
It took until the Spring of 1999 for google.com to break through the 2Mbps usage commit!
I first set foot in the Google data center on Feb 1st, 1999. Well, not really, you couldn’t really “set foot” in that small a space.  Larry had led me there for a tour (I wasn’t an employee yet) and it was my first time in any data center. Image
A short while afterwards we got an additional cage (maybe 3x larger) for 84 servers across 4 racks (assembled by a local shop called King Star Computer, IIRC).
Finally, in June we got a still very crammed cage for 2400 of the infamous "cork board" servers, one of which you can see at the Computer History Museum, Natural History Museum, and a few more. Image
It had some adventurous features but if you have just 2-3 weeks to design a very high density rack on the cheap, and haven't ever done it before, that's what you get :-)
But it all started with 28 sqft of space and a few PCs.

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More from @uhoelzle

Jul 13, 2022
In this next episode of "Tales from the trenches of infrastructure", learn about the power of lasers...how did this piece of fiber get burnt to a crisp? (Hint: lasers!)

A thread.⬇️
We use two types of optical amplifiers in our network. The workhorse is what's known as an Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier.

fiberlabs.com/glossary/erbiu…
The second type of amplifier is known as a Raman amplifier and is named after the physicist who discovered the principles, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who was the first Asian to win a Nobel prize for his work for this research.
nobelprize.org/prizes/physics…
Read 10 tweets
Dec 17, 2021
Here's another story from the trenches of the internet. Last month, a fire in a rural area of South Carolina damaged one of the fiber links that connect Google datacenters (picture below). 100Tbps of capacity lost and restored in 12 hours!🧵 Image
What you see is a "splice box" where the fiber briefly come to the surface, for example, to connect to a different fiber route. Often these are underground, too, but not here.
In this case, there also was a "slack loop", extra fiber that's coiled underneath to make future repairs easier. Because of the intensity of the brush fire, both the splice box and the fiber were melted.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2020
Wednesday at 7am PDT, the Supreme Court of the US is hearing a landmark case, Google v. Oracle. Google's side is supported by fifteen amicus briefs filed by orgs as diverse as Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, 78 computer scientists, and the American Antitrust Institute.
Why is this so important? If Oracle won, APIs would be copyrighted. Anyone who knows software understands how disastrous that would be.
Details: project-disco.org/google-v-oracl… is an in-depth source.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 15, 2020
1/ Looks like a piece of Google Cloud history found its way to @donttrythis of Myth Busters fame. The video does a great job showcasing it, except Adam should have turned off the lights in the cave ;-) But let me add a few bits about its history.

2/ Back in 2008 or 2009 I came across a flashlight that was beautifully made and super bright, but not quite safe. It got so hot after a few minutes that you could get burns, and more importantly put the lithium ion batteries in jeopardy. But it was insanely bright.
3/ I showed it to a few people in our HW team...could we make such a light safe, and cheap enough to hand out to employees as schwag? It turns out we could! (Much credit goes to Grant Gundler who did most of the work.)
Read 12 tweets
May 21, 2020
Ok here's a new one: did you know that cows can cause network outages? Don't laugh, it happened to us.

The beginning of the story: recently, we noticed frequent short outages ("flaps") on a multi-terabit fiber path through Oregon. 1/
This link is an aerial fiber link (fiber is strung along the path of a high-voltage power line). Such links have lower reliability because storms, trees, ice, and the occasional hunter can damage them. 2/
But this time we found something new: the fiber line had fallen to the ground yet continued to work just fine. But recently a farmer had started grazing a herd of cows nearby. And whenever they stepped on the fiber link, they bent it enough to cause a blip. 3/
Read 4 tweets

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