Google data centers

Google data centers are the large data center facilities Google uses to provide their services, which combine large drives, computer nodes organized in aisles of racks, internal and external networking, environmental controls (mainly cooling and humidification control), and operations software (especially as concerns load balancing and fault tolerance). There is no official data on how many servers are in Google data centers, but Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. This number is changing as the company expands capacity and refreshes its hardware. The locations of Google's various data centers by continent are as follows: The original hardware (circa 1998) that was used by Google when it was located at Stanford University included: Sun Microsystems Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256 MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system. 2 × 300 MHz dual Pentium II servers donated by Intel, they included 512 MB of RAM and 10 × 9 GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran. F50 IBM RS/6000 donated by IBM, included 4 processors, 512 MB of memory and 8 × 9 GB hard disk drives. Two additional boxes included 3 × 9 GB hard drives and 6 x 4 GB hard disk drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II. SDD disk expansion box with another 8 × 9 GB hard disk drives donated by IBM. Homemade disk box which contained 10 × 9 GB SCSI hard disk drives. As of 2014, Google has used a heavily customized version of Debian Linux. They migrated from a Red Hat-based system incrementally in 2013. The customization goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per dollar, not absolute performance. How this is measured is unclear, but it is likely to incorporate running costs of the entire server, and CPU power consumption could be a significant factor.