CNET news is reporting that for the first time in company history, computing giant Google unveiled their server design this past week at a data center efficiency conference.  Google has literally hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide and they are all custom built, not outsourced to popular companies like Dell or Sun Microsystems.

The servers are your run of the mill Intel/AMD 2U servers with a few modifications.  One of which is an emergency battery back-up.  Each machine has its own dedicated 12-volt battery to provide power in emergency situations.  Why batteries you may ask?  Large UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) only have efficiencies levels in the low 90′s, while batteries allow Google to obtain more than 99.9% efficiency.

Google stores these servers inside of shipping containers, known as modular data centers.   What you get is one enormously powerful data center which holds about 1,160 severs inside.  You thought keeping your office cool with three machines running was bad, huh?

What makes modular data centers so great is they cost considerably less than your bricks and mortar facility, and can be shipped like any other container to places in the world where building a traditional data center just isn’t feasible.  The design of the actual data center within the container also makes it very scaleable.

My reaction after reading this article was, “oh, so that’s how Google runs the world, I get it”.