Google Data centers • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Data centers

#51

Post by dclusin » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 1:35 AM UTC

aray wrote: post #42

mikeyouse wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$212 million in incentives for a three-hundred-billion dollar company, ugh. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-cost...

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing. The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much hi…

This actually makes a lot of sense to me (someone from an urban area). I never understood why all these towns in the middle of nowhere USA would offer such generous subsidies but this line of reasoning perfectly justifies it. I suspect the cost to decommission or "right-size" these sorts of facilities would probably cost... on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Re: Google Data centers

#52

Post by osxrand » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 2:14 AM UTC

alphakappa wrote: post #7

These are beautiful pictures, but it was hard to navigate. 'Go Inside' for example, would dump in the middle of a gallery of images, making me think that I had missed the thumbnails at the beginning. Having a button in the middle of these images was also weird (as is having to click something just to see what the images are about. There's plenty of screen real-estate to show the image caption). Also strange is that t…

The arrow navigations don't work for me at all in safari on ios7.

None of the photos would load, only the first, the captions worked no problems tho, and would scroll through them all as they should.

No other browsers on iOS (that I have installed) work either. Pretty poor showing from a company that promotes openness and interoperability.

Re: Google Data centers

#53

Post by Arelius » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:49 AM UTC

aray wrote: post #42

mikeyouse wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$212 million in incentives for a three-hundred-billion dollar company, ugh. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-07-22/the-high-cost...

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing. The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much hi…

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

Re: Google Data centers

#54

Post by sharkweek » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 5:23 AM UTC

Arelius wrote: post #53

aray wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing. The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much hi…

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

We don't -- but when we don't, another county will

Re: Google Data centers

#55

Post by codfrantic » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 8:05 AM UTC

alexkus wrote: post #39

47 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do a lot of photo shoots for our furniture products. The Photoshop team usually will mirror one side of the sofa with other to make the pictures look symmetrical and nicer. I won't be surprised if the pictures are photoshopped to make them symmetrical to give them a less messy look.

If you look at the photo it's just three sets of racks that have been mirrored to the other side; the ones with the orange lights and red cables. None of the other racks looked mirrored.

Now that you mention it I remember that the mirroring was done to hide a gap in the racks on the right!

Re: Google Data centers

#56

Post by _mulder_ » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 10:54 AM UTC

Arelius wrote: post #53

aray wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing. The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much hi…

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

Quite right, and lot's of places don't. You can ask them how many Datacenters they have.

Seriosuly though, you're right, if nobody offered subsidies, they would all be on a level playing field and market forces would win out. However, it only takes one to break rank and the free market is gone.

Re: Google Data centers

#57

Post by oshineye » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 5:51 PM UTC

Too bad they never show the interesting stuff.

Modern clusters use a new fabric type called Jupiter, built with the Trident+ chips made by Broadcom, that can grow up to ten times bigger then the old Watchtower clusters (up to 150k servers per fabric)

Old racks have been replaced by the Ikea enclosures that provide DC at the rack level.

The new machines are also really powerful in terms of cpu power and I/O (flash storage, 20Gbit network) and are significantly faster then the previous generation. The public pictures presented in the past are of really old designs that are not longer in service.

Re: Google Data centers

#58

Post by aray » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 10:42 PM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #54

Arelius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

We don't -- but when we don't, another county will

This is it, dead on.

The problem is not incentivizing just your old textile/paper-processing county, it's competing with all of the other ones. So at the end of the day hopefully everyone's done their homework and the community is still making more money than it was before.