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Google server rack

Google server rack

Image creditSteve Jurvetson
CC BY 2.0 ↗

Google server rack

Year
1999
Creator
Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Company
Google
Location
Google, Palo Alto, California

Description

This rack holds trays of 80 low-cost PCs and two Hewlett-Packard Ethernet routers that Google made in 1999. Google later gave the rack, which weighs approximately 300 pounds, to the Computer History Museum.

Importance

Google ran its search engine on clusters of low-cost commodity PCs and wrote its own software for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the search engine as research at Stanford, where Jerry Yang and David Filo had made Yahoo. In June 1999 Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million in Google.

Interesting fact

In 1996 the first Google storage at Stanford held 40 GB on ten 4 GB disk drives, in a case of Lego bricks.

Sources

  1. Google server assembly, catalog 102662167 ↗Computer History Museum
  2. The Original Google Computer Storage (1996) ↗Stanford University InfoLab
  3. Our story ↗Google
  4. Search (CHM Revolution exhibition) ↗Computer History Museum
  5. Google Receives $25 Million in Equity Funding ↗Google · 1999-06-07
  6. Google Inc. registration statement (Form S-1) ↗U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2004-04-29