Pundit Robert X Cringely, who recently keynoted WebMasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas, claims to know what Google wants with all the dark fiber it’s reportedly purchased, but we think there’s another reason.
He’s found a deep dark secret in the Googleplex, our Cringely has. Lurking in places where even Googlers may not tread, rests an item of such significance, it could change the Internet and finally connect all those GoogleNet threads in one logical tie-up:
The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. 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.
Forget about latency if Google drops one of these off at a peering point near you. High-bandwidth and low cost means Google can deliver streaming video content without a hiccup.
While Cringely mentions the potential for these portable data centers to house the “coming AJAX office and other productivity apps,” he didn’t mention the single bit of content that makes Google a $117 billion company – advertising.
Google has been toiling away at its Video project. A touchstone of Google development is make the cool product first, make money off of it later. Imagine if AdWords and AdSense could deliver video ads, and promise advertisers a certain level of reliability and delivery.
The lack of ad inventory affecting rivals Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft doesn’t have an impact on Google’s network of sites that display contextual ads. We’ve noted an increase in broadband adoption this year over past years. Google’s datacenters-on-trucks could be the way the company maintains its lead in search advertising over its competitors.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
