Google: How Many Servers (Google’s Data Center)?

May 31, 2008

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Sometimes I sit down and think about it, how many servers Google have? There is a estimate that CNET have published and they said 200,000 which I really doubt, the opinions also are from WebmasterWorld:

On the other hand, Dean seemingly thinks clusters of 1,800 servers are pretty routine, if not exactly ho-hum. And the software company runs on top of that hardware, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers, is another matter altogether.

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

Other People Opinions:

For some time now, the number tossed around in many informed speculations has been 500,000 servers. Since this 200,000 is also one reporter’s speculation and not any official word from Google, I’m still more inclined toward the 500,000 number.

According to their 10Q filing for the period ending March 31, 2008, Google spent $355,734,000 on Information Technology Assets. This category of assets can include everything from laptops, desktops, servers, mainframes, printers…

With world population at 6,671,200,860, if Google has a half million servers — that’s one server for every 13,342 people.

Since there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and a query can be processed in a -1/2 second, that would mean the hardware could handle all queries if every person on the planet did 12.95 searches every 1/2 second, all day, every day.

Math:
6,671,200,860 / 500,000 = 13,342.4017
60 * 60 * 24 = 86,400
86,400 * 2 = 172,800
172,800 / 13,342 = 12.9515815

That doesn’t take into account the number of people who aren’t online, don’t own or know how to use a computer, the 39% of people who use something other than Google for search, newborns, infants, people in comas…

I know, that also doesn’t account for using some of the servers for crawling, building indexes, running Adwords / Adsense, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc… and of course using more than a few of the servers to handle their Accounts Receivables and payroll processing.

I’d be more impressed to hear they had less servers.

Let’s look at a new Google data center and see how far out 200,000 servers really is…

Lenoir, NC is 100,000 sq ft – let’s assume that they can fit just 5000 racks in there (which seems low) and let’s assume that 2U is used instead of 1U. You have space for around 100,000 servers in that one data center. Google is reported to have 36 centers worldwide – some will be much smaller than this but I’d be amazed if there weren’t already close to a million machines under their control.

We have to remember that Google processes a lot of data for all sorts of applications:

Google Search
AdWords
Maps
Analytics
YouTube
…

Some of the latest research I’ve been reading which digs into their S1 Filings to determine hardward expenses, etc. puts the number at 1 million+ servers. That same source estimates that Google installs 100,000 servers per quarter.

that’s almost one every minute!

How many servers do you think that Google have?

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Posted in Search Engines