Take a trip down memory lane to Google's first data center
Google's eighth employee, Urs Hölzle, shares some of his experiences at the company's first datacenter, back when it was less a datacenter and more a tiny closet surrounded by competitors.
(Credit: Urs Holzle/Google)
Before Urs Hölzle became Google's first chief engineer, he took a tour of the company's server room at the Exodus datacenter in Santa Clara, Calif. Not yet a Google employee, Larry Page had taken Hölzle there for a tour on Feb. 1, 1999, making it possibly the shortest Google datacenter tour of all time.
'You couldn't really 'set foot' in the first Google cage because it was tiny,' Holzle said on Google+ on Tuesday, almost 15 years to the day since that tour. The cage was 7 feet by 4 feet, around 2.5 square meters, 30 personal computers arranged on the shelves provided the world with more Google than it could handle.
Because of the way that the datacenter was arranged at the time, many of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley at the time had their servers sitting on top of one another.
'Our direct neighbor was eBay, a bit further away was a giant cage housing DEC / Altavista, and our next expansion cage was directly adjacent to Inktomi,' he said. Exodus was one of the first colocation facilities in Silicon Valley.
Google's server structure was designed so that a1 through a24 built and served the main index, while c1 through c4 crawled the Internet.
Unexpectedly, Sergey Brin jumped into the conversation to add details.
'We skipped 'b' because 'c' stood for crawl,' Brin said. 'I then decided to skip 'e' because I figured it sounded too much like 'd' and would be confusing, though of course we later adopted all the other similar sounding letters anyway.'
Brin's comment is no. 17. Google+ doesn't allow for direct links to comments, only posts.
Brin added details to the fly-by-night operation of Google's first off-site servers.
A quick footnote to the 'a' machines: we improvised our own external cases for the main storage drives including our own improvised ribbon cable to connect 7 drives at a time (we were very cheap!) per machine. Of course, there is a reason people don't normally use ribbon cables externally and ours got clipped on the edge while we ferried these contraptions into the cage. So late that night, desperate to get the machines up and running, Larry did a little miracle surgery to the cable with a twist tie. Incredibly it worked!
It's not entirely clear, but it sounds like by the time that Hölzle joined Google, the company had its second server cage adjacent to the first. It contained Google's first four server racks, each with 21 machines labeled d1 through d42 and f1 through f42. Brin noted in his comment that they were probably made by Kingstar, running on a single motherboard and a Pentium II CPU.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The 'g' rack introduced soon thereafter became the first of Google's famous 'corkboard' racks.
Longtime Google employee and the Webspam team leader Matt Cutts chimed in at comment 23 to note that Google's main ads database was on one machine back then, f 41.
As the invoice above shows, it cost Google $1,200 per month per megabit of data, and they had to purchase two megabits at a time. Holzle said that Google traffic reached that level in the summer of that year, when one megabit equalled around one million queries per day.
The deal included a complimentary number of 'reasonable' reboots per month.
(Credit: Google)
It also reveals that Google was able to get a discount on some of its bandwidth.
'You'll see a second line for bandwidth, that was a special deal for crawl bandwidth. Larry had convinced the salesperson that they should give it to us for 'cheap' because it's all incoming traffic, which didn't require any extra bandwidth for them because Exodus traffic was primarily outbound,' Hölzle said.
The handwritten note at the bottom of the invoice, '3 20 amps in DC,' is important, he said, because at the time datacenter space was sold by the square foot. 'We always tried to get as much power with it as possible because that's what actually mattered.'
Although the Exodus datacenter has been shut down, many of its artifacts live on in the Computer History museum.
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