The Google guys are really smart. And, like to have 5 data centers within 100MS to support a geographic region. i wrote about 4, Where is the 5th?
My guess is the 5th is in NAP of America's Miami where many serve the LATAM market.
A peak in Google's 111 8th Ave building, Google Research
We all know 111 8th Ave as the data center property Google bought, but there are lots and lots of office space in that building. Who is in there? Google Research is one group.
I was watching the above video, and it looked the NYC sky line.
And, then I saw one of people is head of Research, NY.
One of the points of the video made early on is how the researcher needs to understand how systems work. And what better way than to put them in a data center building. Well they probably don't think of it as a data center building. But with all the fiber coming into the building it is one of the most highly connected places in the world.
A Data Center Analyst View of Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham posted on Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database.
The Research Publication is published here.
Abstract
Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.
To appear in:
OSDI'12: Tenth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Hollywood, CA, October, 2012.Download: PDF Version
I have got a bit more time to go through the paper and I'll highlight parts I find interesting from a data center analyst perspective.
First thing caught my eye.
Applications can use Spanner for high availability,
even in the face of wide-area natural disasters, by replicating their data within or even across continents. Our
initial customer was F1 [35], a rewrite of Google’s advertising backend. F1 uses five replicas spread across
the United States.
What is F1?
And how does this relate to Spanner?
Google has 3 to 5 data centers in a geographic region.
Why 5, not just 3?
I had just written about Google's move to Chile had three more. So, need to get used to looking for 5 Google data centers to support a geographic reason with 100ms latency, not just three.
I could go longer into the document, but I think the post will get too long. Let's just stop with one point that is useful in looking at these two documents. Google has 5 data centers within 100ms in a geographic region to support ad business which is where they make most of their money.
Google buys Nik SW, increasing investment in photography
Facebook bought Instagram, so most are focusing on Google's purchase of Nik SW for Snapseed. Apple has Aperture and iPhoto. It doesn't look good for Adobe and Microsoft in the photography area.
Vic Gundotra announced the acquisition on Google+
Vic Gundotra
8:34 AM - Public
Yet, none of these announcements and Nik SW focus on Snapseed.
We are pleased to announce that Google has acquired Nik Software. For nearly 17 years, we’ve been guided by our motto, “photography first”, as we worked to build world class digital image editing tools. We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures.
We’re incredibly grateful for all of your support and hope you’ll join us on the next phase of our journey as part of Google.
All our best!
The Nik Software Team
It looks like there is going to be a lot more photos in Google's data centers.
Google hits #5 spot in Server Mfr Ranking, The Big Users defining the market
Wired has a post that has people's attention that HP, Dell, and IBM are no longer the dominant Server force of the past. Part of the past is the reliance on IDC and Gartner to get a view on the market.
It should be noted, however, that research operations such as IDC and Gartner don’t have the best view into direct sales by the ODMs — let alone Google’s highly secretive hardware operation — and these hidden parts of the market are increasingly important. It’s the big web players that are moving away from the HPs and the Dells, and most of these same companies offer large “cloud” services that let other businesses run their operations without purchasing servers in the first place.
What is catching people's attention is that Google is the #5 manufacturer.
But just four years later, Bryant says, the landscape has completely changed. Today, she explains,eight server makers account for 75 percent of Intel’s server chip revenues, and at least one of those eight doesn’t even sell servers. It only makes servers for itself. “Google is something like number five on that list,” Bryant told us on Monday evening, during a dinner with reporters in downtown San Francisco.
But, the overall pattern that is occurring is Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, and Microsoft are investing and demanding server innovation that the big OEMs (HP, Dell, and IBM) are not necessarily set up to serve. Which then brings up the ODMs of Quanta, Tyan, Supermicro, ZT Systems and others who are rising up the ranks.
As Bryant points out, other companies are now buying machines directly from “original design manufacturers,” or ODMs, in Asia, working to cut costs in much the same way. This includes Facebook, and according to a former employee of one large ODM, it includes Amazon as well.
These ODMs in general don't have the marketing budgets to have IDC and Gartner analyze and report their sales.
Would you trust an Intel executive or IDC/Gartner and a vendor to give a report on the state of the server market?
But an HP spokesperson said her comments were inconsistent with the latest server market stats from research outfit IDC, which still put the combined market share of HP, Dell, and IBM at 73.9 percent, down slightly from 78.2 percent in 2008.