Rethinking about yesterday’s webcast, it occurred to me that maybe the idea of Google adopting Sun hardware is not so ludicrous after all. We all know that Google uses commodity hardware by the tens of thousands because it’s cheaper and because if one machine breaks, hundreds of others are available to take up its load.
But it’s possible that hardware prices do not make up the biggest slice of Google’s data centers operating expenses. Space is not cheap and power even less so, especially given the current oil prices. Keeping this in mind, wouldn’t a server that offers, according to Jonathan Schwartz,
- 50% more performance
- 63% less electricity consumption
- 1/4 the physical size,
- at 1/3 the price
than its competition, allow Google to more than offset the higher cost of a Galaxy server? One like the x4100 could also probably take the place of four or more Pentium servers and, with 64bit CPUs, be able to address much more data. Which must not be bad, considering the size of data Google is managing.
Admittedly, this is just wild speculation on my part. I have no idea what is the TCO that Google is paying for its servers, nor what would be the cost of operating a Sun server instead. With energy prices continuously on the rise, though, I expect the former to rise significantly.
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