

Urs Hölzle on Google's first data center - cramforce
https://plus.google.com/+UrsH%C3%B6lzle/posts/UseinB6wvmh

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jrockway
The interesting quote here is:

 _You 'll see a second line for bandwidth, that was a special deal for crawl
bandwidth. Larry had convinced the sales person 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._

This shows that there's more to being a successful business than just good
code; you need to know how to run a business, too. How many people working on
web search ranking would ask for a special pricing exception from their
bandwidth provider and get it? The answer is, apparently, one.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Actually it is a pretty typical arrangement, provided you can deliver on your
commitment to a certain ratio of inbound/outbound.

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Veus
Maybe now it is but back in 1998?

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patrickg_zill
Yes.

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damian2000
Here's another anecdote (also sourced from Urs Hölzle) about how Google
transferred 9TB of data to their new east coast datacentre via fibre, for
free.

[http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-
cap...](http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html)

~~~
scottdrr
really

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nugget
I have heard that Microsoft's hardware cost to serve 1000 searches is > $1
while Google's equivalent cost is around $0.07. If true, this is definitely a
competitive advantage.

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jpatokal
Both figures seem unlikely, given that Google served ~2 trillion searches last
year and did not spend $151 billion doing it. (The entire company spent on the
order of $20 billion in 2013, and that's for _everything_.)

[http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-
searches/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/)
[https://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q4_google_earnings...](https://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q4_google_earnings.html)

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lpolovets
The grandparent mentioned $.07 per 1000 searches, not per search. I think that
brings the figure down to something pretty reasonable. ($151 million.)

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dopamean
$140 million on search? I haven't a clue if that is high or low. Seems low if
the company's total expenses were $20 billion.

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mden
The distinction here is that's for hardware cost only. I imagine salary costs
are much higher.

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dopamean
Ah I knew I was missing something there. Thanks.

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TrainedMonkey
This would be more aptly titled: "Urs Hölzle on Google's first data center"

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Oculus
Hypothetical: If AWS was available at the time Google was just starting, would
it have made sense for them to go with AWS?

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ChuckMcM
No, for the same reason it _still_ doesn't make sense to go with AWS.
Basically you need a large number of cores that are intimately integrated
amongst a large quantity of storage. It was the fact that all the machines
could have a bunch of drives on them for "free" (low marginal cost). By
interspersing the data and the compute you get maximum bandwidth to local
assets.

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wmf
Isn't that how EC2 works?

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mwcampbell
If I understand correctly, the problem is that persistent storage (either S3
or EBS) is network-attached, and you pay by the gigabyte and by the number of
requests or IOPS.

