As the founders of Google "deceived" the Internet provider
In 2000, Google had data centers only on the west coast of the United States, and the company wanted to expand and open a data center on the east coast. There was a problem how to transfer a huge database from one data center to another. The search index just exceeded 1 billion pages and contained dozens of terabytes of data.
At that time, the business had not yet given any crazy money, and the founders of the company Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to save as much as they could. They felt that data transfer at a speed of 1 Gbit / s would take several days, and for the traffic they would have to pay $ 250 thousand.
Larry and Sergey went to the trick. The fact is that at that time, Internet providers had a standard practice: channel loading was measured every 5 minutes, and at the end of the month 5% of the extreme readings were discarded in order to level out abnormal traffic spikes (see burstable billing ).
Larry and Sergey decided that if they load the channel in less than 5% of a month (that is, 36 hours), they will be able to avoid payment. So they did: every month, for three nights, Google transmitted data from the west to the east coast at maximum speed, and the rest of the time the routers were turned off. At the end of the month, the company received an invoice for $ 0. This went on for several months, until they copied the entire index.
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Perhaps the founders of Google and considered the banal option of sending media by mail. But in those days, the HDD capacity was not too big: to write 20 terabytes it would take hundreds of HDDs or tape drives that would be sent back and forth, it would not have been that expensive. But they found the option even cheaper.
This story is described in Stephen Levy's book, “At Googleplex: How Google Thinks, Acts, and Shapes Our Lives” (In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives).
By the way, a similar story with the "optimization" of costs occurred c Microsoft in 2012, when in one of the data centers it was necessary to quickly burn electricity at $ 70 thousand to avoid a fine of $ 210 thousand for not generating the required volumes.
At that time, the business had not yet given any crazy money, and the founders of the company Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to save as much as they could. They felt that data transfer at a speed of 1 Gbit / s would take several days, and for the traffic they would have to pay $ 250 thousand.
Larry and Sergey went to the trick. The fact is that at that time, Internet providers had a standard practice: channel loading was measured every 5 minutes, and at the end of the month 5% of the extreme readings were discarded in order to level out abnormal traffic spikes (see burstable billing ).
Larry and Sergey decided that if they load the channel in less than 5% of a month (that is, 36 hours), they will be able to avoid payment. So they did: every month, for three nights, Google transmitted data from the west to the east coast at maximum speed, and the rest of the time the routers were turned off. At the end of the month, the company received an invoice for $ 0. This went on for several months, until they copied the entire index.
')
Perhaps the founders of Google and considered the banal option of sending media by mail. But in those days, the HDD capacity was not too big: to write 20 terabytes it would take hundreds of HDDs or tape drives that would be sent back and forth, it would not have been that expensive. But they found the option even cheaper.
This story is described in Stephen Levy's book, “At Googleplex: How Google Thinks, Acts, and Shapes Our Lives” (In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives).
By the way, a similar story with the "optimization" of costs occurred c Microsoft in 2012, when in one of the data centers it was necessary to quickly burn electricity at $ 70 thousand to avoid a fine of $ 210 thousand for not generating the required volumes.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/170063/
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