The Google Portable Datacenter

Robert Cringely's latest column likens Google's strategy for domination of the Internet to Wal-Mart's approach to retail. It's a comparison that has been made before. And one Google CEO Eric Schmidt accepts to an extent. But Cringely's speculation is based on a Google innovation that hasn't received much attention: a datacenter condensed into a shipping container. He writes, "Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid."
