Google's approach to datacenter design is interesting: Google released a 6.5 minute video of their datacenter. Amazing is understatement. It looks like set of Matrix . Google Datacenter has 45 containers (like ship containers) in which they host 45000 servers.
Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of Google have shared best practices of datacenter design in thier book 'Datacenter as a machine; Introduction to design of warehouse scale computing' . Very interesting ideas there.
Warehouse scale computing views entire datacenter as a computer and not individual server (pizza box approach) Message: Come out of pizza box computing/regrigerator computing ; warehouse scale computing is here.
Link to Google's 6.5 minute video on their datacenter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I&feature=player_embedded
The ideas incorporated in Barroso and Hölzle book 'Warehouse scale computing' are too important to be not available in this blog. Presenting abstract from their book :
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Abstract of Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle book
'The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines'
'The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines'
As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today’s WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today’s WSCs on a single board.
Book can be downloaded from site: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006
Read it for important ideas on Google way of cost effective . energy efficent way to computing.
