Flashes into the Google Kimono

Google is very cryptic about everything (excessively if you ask us) creating an environment not unlike celebrity watching where a table napkin used by Julia Roberts would be a revered souvenir.   There have been a couple of Google disclosures in the last few months that are really interesting. First, in April, Google held a meeting to tell IT leaders about their power and carbon practices. Google has achieved amazing power utilization efficiency (the percentage of power that actually goes to running the IT) and continues to improve with fascinating innovation. One source of power inefficiency is battery backup, since many data center designs create battery voltage and then reconvert to data center voltage. The Google design puts a little backup battery on each server as a smart (from a systems point of view) but intuitively unexpected solution. Google authored a book (The Data Center as a Computer) that by their direction is available as a free PDF for download. It provides more insights into the design and operation of large data centers. If you want one of Larry Page's napkins you'll have to look on eBay.