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.
Some Int'l Electricity Tariff data, that's why data centers are where they are
The price and availability are critical for data centers to exist. The Economist has an article on Brazil's Electricity Tariff, and what caught my attention is the range of Electricity Tariffs.
How electricity tariffs are used in each country to tax consumption in industries and consumers has an interesting impact on where you will put your data center.
The cost of electricity is bumped up by 28 different taxes which together account for almost half the average bill, according to Acende Brasil, an energy-research institute. As a result, energy prices for industrial users are extraordinarily high (see chart). Ms Rousseff announced that from early next year two taxes will go altogether and a third one will be slashed by three-quarters. Officials say further savings will come from having driven a hard bargain with generating companies over extending contracts due to expire soon. All in all, residential bills will fall by an average of 16%, and industrial ones by 19-28%, they say.
Brazilians spend twice as much on the electricity costs built into other goods and services as on their own residential bills, calculates FIPE, a research institute at the University of São Paulo. High energy tariffs can be passed on to the consumer in this way partly because Brazil’s economy is fairly closed. This shows little sign of changing. On September 4th the government announced a year-long rise in import tariffs on 100 goods, ranging from tyres to medicines, to protect Brazilian manufacturers. Another 100 items may be added to the list next month.
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.