NevDull’s Take On Things

Google’s Dark Fiber

May 8th, 2007

It’s been quite a while since I heard anything about Google and their dark fiber ambitions. I just got home from an Akamai user forum, and happened to see a link in IRC to one of Joel Spolsky’s posts. From there, I followed a few links, and eventually ended up here.

That links to an article from November of 2005 in which Cringely talks about Google’s ability, with datacenter-in-a-shipping-container, to be a bit of a Walmart on steroids. That, of course, brought to mind both archive.org’s Petabox and Sun’s Project Blackbox. Actually, the Petabox philosophy (aside from the shipping-container form factor) even seems to jive with Google’s storage philosophy.

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

Man, this has to get you thinking. I know that the number of Google’s data centers has gone up dramatically… are they just dumping these shipping containers everywhere and wiring them up? When does it end? Is there a need for it to end? Was Google polite with China because they have 600 of these things ready to deploy inside the Great FireWall? Does Google scale up the Google Apps that compete with Office by dropping one in an office park? Or even crazier, in a parking space leased to them by Wal-Mart?

Entry Filed under: General, The Geek Factor