Google’s Shipping Container
This week, Cringely writes about Paper War, but I don’t get the title. There interesting thing is that he writes about something in the underground parking garages of Google’s Mountain View offices. This shipping container is Google’s new idea of a data center. Housing 3.5 petabytes of storage and 5000 Opteron processors, it can be dropped of anywhere and become a node in what was once coined the Google Grid. Cringely predicts that Google will have over 300 Boxes like this located at every peering point in the internet, meaning that Google is always very close. That is why they are buying up dark fiber. You probably get the peering for free as the ISP keeps the traffic to Google properties in their networks, and between the boxes it is quasi free, or rather at no incremental cost.
I think it’s a very nice idea, but what makes me wonder is why Cringely believes that that means that Google will quasi become Web 2.0. I wrote about something similar recently though and this might be just another piece in the puzzle, especially if Google is allowed to monitor the traffic of the ISP. And of course, once Google stores my MP3 library, then have short latency is important.
Update : More though are here and yes, I did miss that one. Once Google has Co-Locations networked through their own Fibre at every ISP backbone, they can tell the ISP to use them as a bandwidth provider, and for cheap most likely. But at this point, some regulatory folks will surely start to take notice.