“GoogleByte” Server Farm Slated for India — I thought that the 767 was extravagant. Now it’s only too obvious that these guys have too much money.
Mumbai, India (AP) – A massive “googlebyte” server farm is being built in a remote corner of India, according to sources familiar with the project. The project is being financed by Silicon Valley giant Google, Inc. If completed on schedule in 2010, “[the server farm] will increase the total amount of installed computer storage capacity in the world by several orders of magnitude,” according to industry analyst Mark Larfey of BuildingStorage.com.
A googlebyte is the largest possible measurement of storage capacity. It is based on the number googol, which is a 10 followed by one hundred zeros. It represents several quintillion times the capacity of the largest current installations of around one petabyte (or one billion megabytes).
“To put this in perspective,” Larfey says, “if each byte of data stored in a googlebyte were the size of a grain of sand, then this server farm would be a thousand times the size of the Sahara Desert. If those grains of sand were laid end to end, they would stretch from the earth to the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”
A senior engineer familiar with the project says the googlebyte farm is being built near the small village Lirpagar, in southern India’s Sloofayad region, an area that has to date not benefited from recent growth in the Indian IT sector. The server farm is so massive, it will require the construction of three separate nuclear power plants in southern India to provide electricity to power and cool it, sources say.
Google management could not be reached for comment about the project or its anticipated cost. But sources say the estimated cost are in the $1.8 trillion range, equal to more than twice the entire current GDP of India.
Google has developed other server farms in various locations, “but nothing even close to this scale,” Larfey said. Construction of the googlebyte farm is slated to begin the first of April.
found by Roger Strukhoff
april fools?
I’m calling shenaningans (or April Fools). The link doesn’t work, and the numbers quoted in the article are just too large to be believable.
NO BLOODY WAY…
Its an April fool…
It was the 3 Nuck plants that Killed the WHOLE idea.
as far as we know there are less than a google atoms in the universe.
Yep, had me untill the power plants.
Not quite funny enough to be a good joke but it does gently mock our inability to be shocked by big numbers anymore.
The power plant sentence raises an issue about outsourcing that I’ve never seen discussed:
outsourcing to India is a very “un-green” thing to do.
India has a horrible power-grid so these places have to be run by highly polluting generators. The one place I saw had huge banks of lead-acid batteries — to run the UPSs — and then deisel generators that ran about half the day.
I’m pretty sure there were no environmental controls, anywhere. Goodness knows what happened to the batteries — probably recycled by poor people — with no health measures — who dump the acid and whatever else crap in the river.
I genuinely hate April 1st. There is enough weird crap that happens in the world that I hate having to actually think about a story for a while to decide if its true.
I was going to put some snarky comment about the “official” news coming from the government and White House, but decided not to get myself all worked up today.
India has lots of nuclear plants, so 3 in one area wouldn’t be a problem.
Where do you buy the starter seeds? I would like to spawn my own server farm.
What is the best mix of water and manure do I use? Once I get a bit growing, how do I prevent rodents from taking bytes?
Does it help to have good shade from my directory Trees?
Will a big directory root interfere with the bit growth?
How much pesticide do I need to keep the bugs out?
Are there any viruses I should look out for?
This farmer would appreciate any help?
hey noway!, you hit the nail on the head early on. Lots of manure is really all that you need. Bull manure is best for this sort of thing.
10, well done. Town of Lirpagar — rag april ?
BubbaRay, Lirpagar is in the Sloofiyad region.
Now waiting for the Googolplex server farm — (10^100)^100 bytes. More bytes than there are cubic nanometers in the universe !! Maybe this ties in with the Yahoo! infinite email….
LOL – This was a good one; I totally beleived it before reading about 3 Nuke plants…
can u tell me the actual size of google server
ron:
Google server farms are actually modest buildings on not-to-large pieces of land, and they buy their electricity from the local utility…usually staffed by 30 to 50 folks…