There are 9 9Gdrives between the two machines...The left box has 3 9G drives, and there are 6 4G drives on the right...This IBMdisk expansion box has another 8 9G drives...This is our homemade disk box which contains 10 9G SCSI drives

294 GB? That's a pretty damn nice mostly donated setup for 1997. This was '97 right?

1GB per person. Servers made of Lego. No April Fools.

Its amazing to think that search engine used to run on just that.

Id be interested to see what their current hardware is like.

us pee ons that we can still create something very special with almost nothing but scrapped together hardware. Who said that we need millions to implement great ideas ?

With a hard drive case made of LEGOs and under a dozen computers google managed to become the world's most powerful search tool.

Is that a PowerPC logo I see on one of their servers?

Looks that way [archive.org].

I remember when those 9 Gig drives were new. Street price was $4000 or $5000 each.

Last time I checked, those same model drives were listing for $5 on E-bay but not selling... it'd cost way more to ship them.

Are they in a museum or Google's vault? ;)

I think those types of setups are familiar to just about anyone that was in the computer arena in the early to mid-nineties. Having random machine without cases, 10 keyboards that may or may not be plugged in, and horrible wiring is probably how many of the top technological companies started. I am sure now it's all properly racked up with labeled cables and a KVM switch, but before the funding, I bet most companies run on old workstations. I thought the lego disk array was appropriate. I wonder what a fire marshal would have to say about their setup.

I think the worst setup I have seen was a previous company I worked for. They had a satellite office that just contained hardware. Well, no one ever went there, and for good reason. It housed quite a bit of old dialup gear, analog dialup gear, complete with external serial 28.8 modems. they were just stacked up all over the place. good thing they thought ahead and got modems with volume knobs, or you would be able to hear each person dialing in. The plastic racks all of the gear was sitting on was so old, it had started cracking and was a hazard to be around. It all worked somehow though. ahh...the good old days.

Oh. I thought you were going to talk about this [google.com].

How does it look today?
how do they manage the wirering to all those servers today?

I love Google and want to have like a million of its babies. I want to print out Google's front page and rub it against my naked body. Actually, I've done it once already, got some nasty paper cuts. But it was worth it.

I LOVE GOOGLE

Here. [archive.org]

Less than a decade later, this sort of storage sits in an ipod. A decade before, we stored 'big' datasets on 20Meg disks.

It's amazing, how hardware changes.

But human-scale things remain the same. It still takes the same time to write a /. comment, or to sigh.

Fowl hardware: pidgeons [google.com]

For those who are wondering, I happen to own two of the very same machines in the top two pictures lol! They are Dell Poweredge 4200 machines with the logo plates removed! The specs are roughly this:

Dual CPU capable (max 333mhz)
Max RAM 512MB Bios Limit (66mhz EDO SDRAM)
6x80pin SCA drive bays
Dual 700 watt hot swap power supplies
Built in VGA (ATI Mach64 VT 1MB)

For the record, they typically ship with AMI Megaraid 428 (or higher) hardware raid cards. But the onboard SCSI2 is Adaptec AIC-7860 & 7880. Also worth mentioning, they are clusterable using Windows NT. I grabbed these machines off machine and local computer store and have been very stable work horses running Debian! (www.emaildesktop.com).
Just glad to see that these machines were useful in their days!

In case you're having a hard time loading the images from the story, you can find some other images here [stanford.edu].

Last I heard Google has a serverfarm of 8000 machines but how many do they have today?

Just to lighten up a little, check out a little story by Verity Stob [ddj.com] on Life in the Google Farm [ddj.com].

If you have broadband and a spare hour, have a look at this lecture [uwtv.org] about google by Urs Holzle. Its reasonably light on hard-core specifics, but he covers some interesting things like determining the relevance of a page, hosting problems due to very high power density, failure rates of hardware etc etc.

Interesting stuff.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of.. nah..

getting some info of google's current hardware in here seems a good idea. here goes.

here [rankforsales.com] is a nice article. The company estimates that a server running Google applications all day is the equivalent of 40 years of use in a regular context. Approximately 82 of these servers die every day, but not completely; Google employs maintenance people who walk around with carts of hard disks, for example, and replace them in malfunctioning servers or UPSes.

now for some pics... damn. can't find them with google :). i'll post them if i have them.

if only the Glastonbury ticket service was on such a powerful set up.

Dual Pentium IIs?

Luxury.

Anyone else see this picture [archive.org] of Sergey in a speed-o? Here [archive.org] is another one of him IN DRAG. I kid you not!

Those are not legos! I remember those things from way back when, they're Duplos. They're way bigger than Legos, and they don't cut your foot when you step on them. They're designed so that little kids can't hurt themselves. I never thought I'd see those again.

There was a database class offered at Stanford that was advertised as being about "things you could do with our db of 1/3rd of the internet's text, including links."

This sounded interesting, but I hated the prof so I didn't take it. This class turned out to be related to the Google project of course and many of the people who took it ended up at the company.

My other brush with Google greatness was being designated driver for Larry (friend of a friend). This was before anyone knew about Google.

Unless those are the worlds smallest servers, I think those look like Duplo blocks, not Legos. I have boxes of both. Duplos are simpler, and about twice the size - although Duplos and Legos can be mixed. The thick Duplo baseplates make a much better case cover, as they would be stiffer than Legos. I especially like the operators' faces as a part of the case.

...when the answer was FLOOR MOUNTED servers the whole time! Next thing you know, we'll find out you can skip the expensive UPS and plug things straight into the wall...nah, that's crazy!