Random questions...

Tyrant1919

I've had a few things on my mind recently.

1. If I had an article on Wikipedia about myself, could I theoretically edit it and as a source put "Myself"? I'd read on some famous people every once in awhile and I always ask myself if this stuff is true? Has anybody ever edited their own Wikipedia page? Or say has our friend Bill ever edited the Microsoft page for example?

2. Obviously companies won't post much on their datacenters. I recently saw the 'first' google server rack. What servers would they be using today? Maybe not just google, any big website. Model numbers, pictures, anything? Just curious what the big boys use.

3. Anybody know where I could get a bare 24u~ rack? http://www.rackframe.com/ is what I got so far, but it'd be $300 for the one I'd want. If I could find one for $150 or so I'd be happy. Doesn't need to have sides or anything, preferrably a top but not needed.

Better hit submit as I got work to do!

astorrs

1. There have been numerous cases where people have edited (usually edited out) information about them or their employers on Wikipedia. They usually get busted and the information gets put back after the change goes public. Politicians are infamous for this.

2. My understanding is Google has around 450,000-500,000 servers located in over 25 data centers around the world. Most of the servers are commodity servers customized for them by the manufacturer (i.e. when you buy thousands of servers at once and you want a few components removed that you don't need it can add up to significant savings).

They also use NetScalers to front-end all the requests from the web acting as load balancers, caches and handle all compression of the traffic. Last time I talked to Citrix about Google (late 2007) they had over 1200 HA pairs of NetScalers (each NetScaler 12000 high-availability pair runs about $150k).

Here is a link to a recent article that covers a few of the scarce details: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Mar/27/google_data_center_faq.html

Microsoft is the second largest operator with somewhere in the 250,000+ server range. They also have tons of NetScalers on the front-end of their websites.

Tyrant1919

That's one website I haven't found in my searches yet, it was probably right in front of my face.

astorrs

The del.icio.us add-in for FireFox is my friend, it completely replaced my Firefox bookmarks a little over a year ago and now everything I Ctrl-D to bookmark gets tagged and is easy to find when it might be of interest down the road.