This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
Slashdot | Google’s Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?
Wow. Needless to say the /. is rather up in a lather about one corporation weilding this sort of power. I wonder if they would as upset if Google were still private or if it were a non-profit. Is there something inherently evil in one corporation exercising a large measure of control over all the info on the net? Can’t say really. All we have to compare something like this to are the monopolies of the last centruies. And none of that ended well.
technorati tags: google, dark fiber