Google is the largest computer manufacturer in the world.

Posted: May 12, 2011

” . . . in order to meet the demands of search, handle the constant experiments the company ran, and accommodate the rapidly growing number of projects at Google other than search, the company had to basically reinvent the computer. “Suddenly, you have a program that doesn’t run on anything smaller than a thousand machines,” says Barroso, codesigner of Google’s data centers. “So you can’t look at that as a thousand machines, but instead look at thousand machines as a single computer. I look at a data center as a computer.”

One building in a data center may have 45 containers holding 1,160 servers, arranged in a two-story setup.

In The Plex by Steven Levy