"Great-grandfather" of Google servers

Could you believe that a little more than 15 years ago, Google was hosted on about 100 servers, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves (Sergey Brin) mounted in a rack and tied together? At the same time, they used cheap components, which would at least somehow reduce the cost of the infrastructure of their search engine. The first servers of the Internet giant had a rather unusual appearance, which only cost the reset buttons on the front panel of each of them and a rather strange, but at the same time interesting method of cork isolation of components from which the servers themselves were called “Corkboard”.



At the moment, the number of Google servers, both physical and virtual, far exceeded the mark of 1 million units. The company invests billions of dollars in infrastructure and now the profit from each server is more than it was at the very beginning of the search engine creation. As Google’s Vice-President for Infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, said:

If you look into the past, the design of the Corkboard servers was not optimized for reliability and performance, but given that we only had two weeks to develop and a very modest budget, the result was good.

Since the components often crashed, the system required effective fault-tolerant software (software), because the Google team focused more on software than on the hardware on which this software was spinning.
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Back in 1999, Google made its most extensive order for equipment. King Star Computer needed to prepare about 1,680 servers in less than a month. For every 80 servers, Google agreed to pay $ 10,000 in advance payments, and after delivery, pay another $ 99.2 thousand. As a result, the total amount of the contract amounted to almost $ 2.3 million, not counting the additional bonuses. The order included 21 cabinets, each of which had 20 shelves and 60 coolers on the rear panel. On each shelf 4 servers of the following configuration were placed:

• motherboard Supermicro P6SBM ;
• x86-compatible Intel Pentium II 400 microarchitecture processor ;
• 256MB PC100 RAM;
• 2 IBM Deskstar 22GXP hard drives;
• Intel 10/100 network card;
• system reset button;
• LED indicator hard drives;
• 2 IDE plumes;
• 2.13 m Internet cable category 5 .

The founders of Google came to the conclusion that the best way to scale economic efficiency is to develop hardware solutions on their own, and not to outsource them. The Internet giant is still working in this direction, expanding its own data centers around the world.