What's The Storage Capacity at Google?

There has been a ton of discussion around this and I can tell you that there is not much information about the storage capacity at Google but there are some interesting facts surfacing right now. First off, Google doesn’t have a centralized server somewhere with all the information on it. It’s broken up in “Server Farms”, 15 to be correct. All of these are placed around the world for faster and better secured than if everything would be storage at the very same place. What the storage capacity is for each of these “Server Farms” is kept under tight security by Google and I would be very surprised if they some day revealed that information. After all, that’s their whole business.

However, some people estimate them having around 450.000 servers in custom made racks holding 40-80 servers per rack. How big the storage capacity is for each server is, I guess, just anyone’s guess.

What is really cool is that everything Google has ever done, by some people, are said to have been documented somewhere on the internet. I’ve dug a little and I have come up with some rather interesting information and facts.

The First Setup – Stanford University – 1998

Google First Setup

Hardware Description:

Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers (donated by Intel) with 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. The main search ran on these.
F50 IBM RS/6000 (donated by IBM) with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives (donated by IBM).
Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.

Also, the first search engine was called “Backrub” and was available 1997 on the Internet.

Here’s a clip of their FIRST production server: