Those of you with an interest about how Google’s data centers operate will want to take a look at the News.com article: Google’s secret of success? Dealing with failure. It offers highlights from a presentation by Urs Hoelzle, a vice president of engineering and of operation at Google. Hoelzle spoke at the EclipseCon on Wednesday.
For all its built-in redundancy in case of failure, the system doesn’t address all problems, Hoelzle revealed. During the presentation, he showed a photo of six fire trucks responding to an emergency at a Google data center in an undisclosed location. He would not reveal any specific details on the mishap except to say that “it wasn’t about one machine going down.”
In a follow-up interview with CNET News.com, Hoelzle said the cost of power is another important factor in Google’s data center designs.
In a 2004 presentation at Stanford, Eric Schmidt talked a bit about Google technology including “power” issues.