Urs Hölzle, Google’s eighth employee and the current senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google, shared some old photos of Google’s first data center, the contract the company signed for it and some more photos even of Sergey Brin helping set it all up 23 years ago.
Today’s is Google’s 23rd birthday, which is why he shared this on Twitter yesterday.
The data center provider was Exodus, a now-defunct company that was a leading provider at the time and had a market cap of tens of billions of dollars at the height of the dotcom bubble. The facility was located at 2251 Lawson Lane in Santa Clara (since torn down).
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
A1 through a24 were the main machines to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines. (There were no b machines.) I say “machine” not “server” because they were whitebox office PC enclosures with external disks attached.
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
Back then, datac enters were priced by the sqft even though the actual cost of providing data center space is almost exclusively proportional to power, so by asking for extra power Larry got a better deal.
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
It took until the Spring of 1999 for https://t.co/2t1XFpR8oP to break through the 2Mbps usage commit!
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
A short while afterwards we got an additional cage (maybe 3x larger) for 84 servers across 4 racks (assembled by a local shop called King Star Computer, IIRC).
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
It had some adventurous features but if you have just 2-3 weeks to design a very high density rack on the cheap, and haven’t ever done it before, that’s what you get 🙂
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
But it all started with 28 sqft of space and a few PCs.
— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 26, 2021
Happy Birthday Google!
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
